Defence cuts weigh heavily on Inverness back four.

Inverness head for Paisley this weekend to take on perennial basement strugglers St Mirren at St Mirren Park.  The men from the North will be without the backbone of their defence as Tokely and Munro are suspended.  I'm sure the Saints fans will be disappointed at Tokely's enforced absence, and with Gillet still nowhere to be seen and Proctor just back from injury, it will be a new partnership that will hope to halt a rejuvenated Craig Dargo after his two cup goals saw the Saints ease past Ayr United in the cup.

Inverness will have to throw the two Chris' together which will leave us with a rather inexperienced back line in regards to partnerships, with young Graeme Shinnie being the elder statesman in terms of matches played for ICT.  Dani Sanchez will definitely miss out after breaking three bones in his hand against Morton with a nasty looking injury.  You have to feel for Dani as he was just getting to grips with the Inverness game after overcoming a series of injuries which kept his time on the park to a minimum in the first half of the season.  He has had his hand screwed back together after an operation on Sunday.  The former Real Murcia player was beginning to show his class with late shows in the cup games.

Terry Butcher was making a meal of things earlier this week as he helped to launch a competition for fans to create a new strip and win themselves a trip to Italy to the Errea factory where the strips are produced.  He looked fair dapper with his chef's bunnet on as he poked a pizza into the oven on the end of his giant spade, complete with his choice of toppings.  It looked more like Game for a Laugh as Terry was caught on camera making a Pizza for the press shoot and it would have been no surprise had Jeremy Beadle popped up to taunt him.  Another man who had plenty publicity this last week was our very own Adam Rooney as his *millenium miss against Morton received it's fair share of air time and will be high on the you tube hit list.  However, Adam was game for a laugh as well and shrugged it off.  Honestly, it will go away in time Adam; just not as soon as you would like.

But, Chef Terry Butcher has bigger fish to fry, and Alternative Maryhill will serve you up the main course with his preview after you have been given a taste of what's to come with the above starter.  Enjoy.

Will Inverness halt winless pattern in Paisley?

On Saturday HMS Sneck sets out for the River Clyde once more. Instead, however, of sailing straight on into the dark heart of paranoia central, this time it will take a sharp right shortly after Erskine down a little tributary called the White Cart, and drop anchor in Scotland’s largest town, Paisley.

Paisley gets an unfair press. To hear some people talk, you would be forgiven for thinking that life there consists of tumbleweeds of blackened tinfoil drifting down deserted concrete precincts. In fact, what you will find when you visit is one of Britain’s finest Victorian town centres, and a place that has made a sizeable contribution to world culture. Paisley has given us, among others, the recently-departed Gerry Rafferty, impish scatman Paolo Nutini, Doctor Who in his tenth incarnation, Robert Tannahill and several other important weaver poets, and one of the finest Scottish playwrights of the last fifty years in John Byrne, now resident in Nairn. Novelist Christopher Brookmyre is from nearby Barrhead but as a St Mirren supporter can claim honorary ‘buddie’ status; anyone who can sneak a jobby onto a mantelpiece in the first chapter of his first novel is worthy of further investigation. As the centre of the Scottish textile industry, Paisley also gave its name to the Paisley pattern, which has adorned shirts, ties, pyjamas and y-fronts worldwide for over two centuries, and this in turn gave its name to one of the most underrated American musical movements, the Paisley Underground, which included bands such as The Long Ryders, The Dream Syndicate and even The Bangles, before they went all Eternal Flame on our asses. In recent years, however, Paisley has known tough times, thanks mainly to the arrival of a monstrous tin shopping centre, Braehead, a few miles to the east, where I had the misfortune to work for several years. Braehead has been blamed for vampirically sucking the life out of Paisley, and while this may be an exaggeration, it is a still a depressing development that has found a mirror to some extent in football in the area.

Until recently, a St Mirren away game was synonymous with a trip to Love Street, a venue of such international renown that it lent its name to a song by The Doors and brothels from Amsterdam to Bangkok and all points in between. Love Street was one of the finest of Scottish grounds, only ten minutes’ walk from Gilmour Street station with a stonking football boozer, The Wee Barrel, en route. The most memorable of many pre-matches spent in there was the weekend after Caley Thistle’s famous cup win at Celtic Park, when the ICT supporters were welcomed like conquering heroes and then saw their profoundly hungover team get thoroughly horsewhipped on the park by St Mirren: two-nil going on five. In 2007, however, St Mirren sold the Love Street ground to the scourge of Inverness, Tesco, and in January 2009, the club moved a new purpose built ground in Greenhill Road, near to where the club had played in the late nineteenth century. Today’s St Mirren Park is a perfectly decent, tight little stadium and, with Paisley St James station less than two minutes away, it couldn’t be more convenient for those of us coming through from Glasgow. This does make it very tempting, though, to simply hop on the 14.35 from Glasgow and then straight back onto the train after the final whistle. A few of the ICT Away crowd have continued to make the pilgrimage from Gilmour Street via the Alamo, but the less energetic among us have just gone for the easy option, and recent trips to Paisley have lost a little something as a result.

St Mirren have a long and admirable history in Scottish football, with three Scottish Cup wins, four European campaigns and several top half finishes in the top flight. Over the past dozen years, however, they have spent almost equal amounts of time in the first division and the SPL, which means that they have been direct rivals of ICT for much of that period. Since their last promotion to the SPL, in season 2005-06, they have finished either tenth or eleventh in each of the last four seasons: unspectacular, but reasonably respectable for a club, like Caley Thistle, operating on a very limited budget and with less appeal for players than the bigger city clubs. Nevertheless, at the end of season 2009-10, St Mirren decided to part company with Gus McPherson, the manager that had got them promoted, kept them up and taken them to the CIS Cup Final, and this was a decision that continues to divide supporters. The team is now managed by a man whom the old firm-centric media would probably regard as the lesser of two Lennons, but Danny Lennon knows that that is not the case. Danny Lennon has had to make substantial changes to the St Mirren team, signing around eighteen players since moving from Cowdenbeath, and Danny Lennon knows that it will be a gradual process, but Danny Lennon has already won many St Mirren supporters’ confidence through Danny Lennon’s reassuring habit of referring to Danny Lennon in the third person and Danny Lennon’s rebuilding process currently has Danny Lennon’s new-look St Mirren sitting in... eleventh. Danny Lennon also has a fine line in waistcoats.

Past fixtures

There are few sides that ICT have played more than St Mirren in the sixteen and half years of our existence. The teams have met thirty-four times in competitive matches: once in the Challenge Cup, once in the Scottish Cup, twice in the CIS Cup and thirty times in the league. ICT have won all the cup ties, but the league record is closer: ICT have won thirteen games, St Mirren nine and eight have been drawn. If the league statistics are limited to games played in the SPL, however, then the picture looks better for St Mirren – they have won six to ICT’s five, with three having been drawn. The clubs didn’t actually meet competitively until the start of season 1999-2000 but by some quirk of fortune then found themselves playing each other three times in eleven days: once in the Challenge Cup, once in the CIS Cup and then once in the league. ICT’s annus mirabilis against the Paisley Saints was 2002-03 when ICT won all five games, scoring eighteen times to St Mirren’s four. Glancing at the Caley Thistle goalscorers from that season is a reminder of what a fine team Steve Paterson had built: Richie Hart and Barry Robson each scored three times in those fixtures, Paul Ritchie scored four and Dennis Wyness five. Little wonder St Mirren would later go on to sign Dennis. He did very little in his time in Paisley, but will go down in history as the first St Mirren player to score at the new Greenhill Road stadium.

Perhaps the most exciting period in the rivalry between the clubs was the climax to season 2008-09. Under the management of Craig Brewster, ICT had lost the season’s first two games against Saints on their way to the bottom of the league, but by the time Gus McPherson took his team north on April 4th, Caley Thistle were a team transformed under Terry Butcher. The second St Mirren fixture had been the third game in a sequence of seven straight league defeats; the third was to be the club’s fifth win in nine games, with Filipe Morais scoring twice in a 2-1 win and taking Caley Thistle above St Mirren and into ninth place in the table. Inverness supporters left the game increasingly confident that the team would avoid the relegation that had seemed inevitable three months previously, and this confidence seemed justified when ICT beat St Mirren by the same scoreline on their own turf just four weeks later. St Mirren supporters must have felt that their team had salvaged something when Jim Hamilton equalised Grant Munro’s early opener in the seventieth minute, but with only seven minutes left, after Saints had failed to clear a corner, Ross Tokely pounced on the loose ball and smashed home the winner. The subsequent scenes of celebration, in the stands, on the platform at Paisley St James, on the train and coming through Glasgow Central, rank among my favourite memories of that season. Of course, as we all know, St Mirren had the last laugh: Caley Thistle failed to win any of their four remaining games and two draws and two defeats saw the Inverness side relegated on a goal difference just two worse than that of their nearest rivals. And who were those rivals? Who else...

Current Form and Team News

A casual glance at the SPL table for February 11th would suggest that Caley Thistle should go into this fixture as comfortable favourites, with six places and eleven points separating the sides. Yet previous results between the teams this season suggest the rivalry is as keen as ever, with each recording a 2-1 away victory, and recent league form also fails to split the sides, with each having taken only two points from their last six games.

ICT have had to rely recently on a fine start to the season and a disrupted fixture list for the sides beneath them to prevent them sliding down the table during a run of ten league games without victory. It is surely no coincidence that this run has occurred during the absence of Jonny Hayes, easily Caley Thistle’s most effective player in the first half of the season. Unfortunately Hayes will again be missing after a brief comeback, and Terry Butcher will also be without Dani Sanchez, who had added some much-needed creativity to the team after recently breaking back into the side. With Grant Munro and Ross Tokely also absent through suspension, the Inverness manager appears to have limited options when deciding his line-up. Yet Saturday’s 5-1 cup victory over Morton has inspired a new optimism among Caley Thistle supporters, particularly the promising performances of transfer window signings Aaron Doran and Chris Hogg and a display of clinical finishing from Adam Rooney and Richie Foran, playing as a front partnership for one of the first times this season. Doran and Hogg are certain to keep their places for this weekend’s game: what remains to be seen is whether Terry Butcher will persist with an out-and-out front two, or whether Adam Rooney will revert to playing more as a lone striker, supported by one of Odhiambo, Foran or recent loan signing from Burnley, Alex McDonald, with another of those three employed on the opposite wing to Doran. Central midfield is also an area where Terry Butcher has to make decisions: Nick Ross may miss out through injury, which means Lee Cox, Russell Duncan, Stuart Duff and David Proctor will be in competition for two places. At the same time, with Ross Tokely suspended, Duff and Proctor are also likely to be competing for the right back role. Confused much yet?

Much has been made this season of the number of changes Danny Lennon has made to the St Mirren squad and the fact that he raided his former club Cowdenbeath for a number of his news signings, but recent line-ups have included plenty of SPL experience. For example, the back four against Ayr on Saturday contained three vastly experienced players, David van Zanten, Lee Mair and John Potter, alongside summer signing Darren McGregor. That said, experience does not always equate with reliability, and at times against Ayr the Saints’ defence looked very unsure of itself. Going forward, on the other hand, St Mirren looked like a side that could cause ICT problems. Winger Paul McGowan, on loan from Celtic, was fast, tricky and prepared to take defenders on; more impressive still was the performance of former Caley Thistle striker Craig Dargo, who scored with a beautiful curling finish from eighteen yards, then rounded the goalkeeper and dribbled past two Ayr defenders to score a second goal that was ultimately the difference between the teams. Dargo has had a terrible time with injuries since moving south, but the quality that made him such a favourite in Inverness is clearly still there, and assuming the injury curse hasn’t struck again, he will surely be in the starting line-up to face Caley Thistle and can be expected to make the afternoon difficult for Chris Hogg and Chris Innes. Among the absentees for St Mirren will be Jim Goodwin, who is suspended, and forward Gareth Wardlaw, impressive in the first game between the teams this season, who has an ankle injury. Midfielder Paddy Cregg missed the Ayr game with a hamstring problem and may be a doubt for Saturday, while defender David Barron and midfielder Nick Hegarty have both been out for some time and although nearing fitness are also unlikely to return.

Prediction

As the history of the fixture above has shown, this is always a difficult result to call, and the recent poor form of the clubs makes it even more so. St Mirren will take confidence from their win in Inverness seven weeks ago, yet after a recent defeat to Hibernian, their proximity to bottom club Hamilton will also surely be preying on their minds. Caley Thistle cannot take much encouragement from recent league results, but there is likely to be a new buoyancy about the dressing room after the impressive cup win against Morton and with the addition of new players of obvious quality. With two potentially vulnerable defences, and front players on either side that look capable of causing problems, I can foresee an unusually high-scoring game for a fixture between these teams.

St Mirren 2 – Inverness Caledonian Thistle 3