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I was born in Cheshire in the North West and have moved around the country a fair bit. One of these moves happened in 2001 when i was just about to leave for High School and moved to Caithness on the very North Highland coast. I grew up a Man United fan and my only football game i'd ever been too was at Crewe Alexandra my home town. After moving to the Highlands me and my dad went to watch ICT play Ayr United with just over a 1,000 supporters and three parts of the stadium being terraced. I Remember Barry Robson was playing as someone made an unsavoury comment to do with his hair and thought it was aimed at me haha. We continued to go to the odd game and then decided to go to the promotion game vs St Johnstone in 04. We hadn't bought tickets and only found out it was sold out listening to Moray Firth on the way down. We were distraught and annoyed at my dad for presuming but we ended up having a great day. We spent the day with about 50-100 others standing next to the A9 watching partly from the Bridge. When Caley were promoted and they opened the gate we ran inside to see the trophy lifted. From then I was hooked and went to a few games in the top flight when Caley returned to Inverness for half a season. Their first full season in 05/06 saw my purchase a season ticket with my mate from school and we travelled down from Caithness on the bus for every home game. My mate stopped going and my sister took his seat eventually and we both continued to be season ticket holder until 2012. By that time I had moved to Stirling for university and continued to travel up by train for home matches, while adding some away days to the card. I wrote match reports and previews for this site. After i graduated in 2012 my family moved back to Cheshire for a few years temporarily as part of my dads job. I had to give up the season ticket but i continued to go to the big games with the League cup semi win over Hearts with nine men and the final against Aberdeen. I returned a year later for the Scottish Cup semi vs Celtic and subsequent final vs Falkirk. I missed the small trip to Europe and will remain a regret as not sure if that will ever happen again. I came up for the final vs Celtic 2 years ago and met my sister at Hampden before returning home with her to see her get married up here. My family moved back to sell our house in Caithness but loved the lifestyle of the highlands too much to leave Scotland and ended up moving slightly further South to a small place near Portmahomack not far from Tain. I regularly come home to visit and even my sister moved back here with her wife after covid. I came up for the final vs Celtic 2 years ago and met my sister at Hampden before returning home with her to see her get married up here. It gives me the great opportunity to get to a home game and I am currently up North and attended the Alloa match 2 weeks ago. I am in my mid 30's now and live in Ipswich, I have made lots of friends through going to watch Ipswich Town and becoming a ST holder there. I went to some fun League 1 matches that reminded me of some the grounds in Scotland that i went with following Caley and eventually got to take in the premier League last season albeit for one season. I have a mate through Ipswich, who is also a Caley fan and happened to be working in Glasgow on the week of the famous Scottish Cup upset. He bought a ticket for the away end and ever since has been hooked. He has also done the NC500 but has not been to many matches in the highlands so I am trying to get a small band of Ipswich supporters that I am close too, to come up and see the highlands and take in a game for a long weekend. Ever since the first time I went to watch I was hooked and continue to support the club afar with the Wyness Shuffle Podcast being a great listen to keep me connected with everything Caley Thistle and hope that the bad times are behind the club and that soon it can again punch above its weight and give some of the more established names in Scottish football a bloody nose once again.

I got into Caley Thistle back in 96 when the new stadium went up. At the time I was living in Tain and I only knew one other Caley fan in my school. Everyone else was County daft. It wasn’t exactly easy being the odd one out, but back then we always seemed to get the better of them, so I didn’t mind too much. If anything, it made the wins even sweeter. My dad was the main reason I followed Caley. He’d been an old Caley fan before the merger, so he sort of nudged me that way. He used to take me to games, and that’s where it stuck. I’ve been in Paisley for about twenty years now, but I still get to my fair share of games. I still try and head north a couple of times a season. Being a Caley fan has never been the easy choice – and it still isn’t – but that’s what makes it. You take the rough with the smooth, and when the big moments come, they mean ten times more. For me it’s always been about more than just football. It’s family, it’s identity, my connection to the Highlands and it’s that little bit of pride knowing you stuck with your team through everything. The one thing that really annoys me is missing out on those first two years, and not seeing Telford Street.

This could turn into a bit of a ramble... I've been on CTO for the best part of a year now. I've searched the forums but haven't found any posts where members explain why they came to be ICT fans. It struck me that as the club is only 31 years old there can't be anyone who (like many clubs fans) have been a supporter for generations. I do appreciate that there were two clubs before with a rich history, and I guess most will come from one of those two backgrounds but there has to be some who have made a choice. I've read Charles Bannerman's book "Against All Odds" and have no intention of dragging up any acrimony from the time of the merger, just wondering what made you choose ICT? For me, the seed was sown 20 years ago when I took a summer holiday in the Highlands (a 10 hour drive from where I live), although that seed took a long while to germinate. I've been a West Ham fan since April 1980 (I did it for a bet) and held a season ticket for 26 years, some of which I travelled home and away every week supporting the team (over 800 matches and 42 current English grounds visited, plus another ten or a dozen no longer in existence). It was against this backdrop of visiting football grounds that travelling up the A9 and seeing a stadium, that you could see into, right next to a main road took my attention [the only other one that springs to mind is Walsall next to the M6]. After this if it ever came up in conversation about having a Scottish team, ICT woud be who I "claimed" although I never really followed any results, just the occasional glance at the tables. I regularly listen to "The Price of Football" podcast, and in the late summer of 2024 heard Andrew Moffat from "The Wyness Shuffle" when he was on as a guest discussing the club's precarious financial position. I then downloaded and listened to a number of episodes of TWS, chucked a few quid in the pot of the crowdfunding effort, joined the ICT Supporters Trust and bought a shirt in an effort to try and help the club survive (clearly I'm no Alan Savage, but every little helps, right?). Administration then hit and I was invested in the survival battle, both on and off the pitch. I gave up my west Ham season ticket at the end of 2023/24, so following the ICT results from afar helped fill Saturday afternoons, and still do with few Premier League matches at 3pm on a Saturday. Maybe I've been lucky in my short time being invested that I didn't really have to endure Big Dunc's tactics, and have only known Kell's gameplans. That in itself is like a breath of fresh air to the, frankly quite boring Premier League down here. OK so the players may be more technically gifted but the "Guardiola" possession tactics that everyone seems to want to employ are dull. I'm really keen to get to some ICT games this season (maybe the 10 hour round trip to QoS next weekend will be my first). The crazy thing is that a plane to Inverness, match ticket and B&B are no more expensive than a train to the London Stadium and a match ticket, such are the PL prices. Anyway, enough of me, what's your story?

Just got this note from the club: Mr Alan Savage will be holding a press conference, to give an update on the club, at 11am on Friday 12th September in the boardroom at the Sarens PSG Stadium.

I too am an Invernessian now living in Forres. But I was down in Sheffield - torn between Blades and Owls - when ICT Were formed as a result of the merger. I was also from Dalneigh so I was a Caley fan. I remember my first game - a win - against Buckie Thistle standing at the Howden End aged 7 with my Dad. This was around 1962 and the team I remember featured the Van Dijk -like Alan Presslie, the goal machines Chic Allan and Davy Johnson, the Neild brothers, and later on, my school mate Gordy Fyffe. Returning to Scotland in 1997 my first ICT game was like a dream. I went alone and delighted in the familiarity of supporting my home team. For the last 10 years or so illness and disability have reduced my supporting to the armchair variety but having been an early Internutter alongside the late Gordyfromsneck and Mr Biro I delight in keeping connected via CTO and now the Supporters Trust. All the best to supporters old and new wherever you come from.

Great topic ! I am one of the locals (or ex-locals) and grew up supporting Caley. I lived in Dalneigh, which was the traditional hotbed of Caley support and from my home in Hawthorn Drive we used to see the players run down the street on their way from Telford Street to what they used as a training pitch at the park beside Dalneigh Primary School a few nights a week. I am an IT guy so when the club was formed in 1994 I started this website which has gone through many incarnations in the last 31 years, including a 10-year spell where it was either the "almost official" and then the "official" site of the club before reverting back to being fully independent. Met some great characters through this website over the years whether at the club, locals, ex-pats, or indeed those who decided to follow the team for some other reason and from some other place. Back then the people travelling from afar were deemed as "InterNutters"! and we often met up when they travelled first in the Caley Inn when Don and Brigit were the landlords, then, latterly in the Innes Bar where Colin offered us a home. Had what I thought to be the best season ticket seats in the stadium, right above the tunnel in the main stand and over the years our initial group of 4 dished out some very spicy 'banter' which nowadays might get us kicked out of the stadium! As many know, one member of our group is no longer with us, and I became an ex-pat myself in 2003 after moving to Canada. I kept the site going because Caley Thistle is in my blood, I will always be an Invernessian, a Highlander, and a Scotsman (in that order). It also keeps me in touch with friends and family from the UK. My voice may now have an odd twang of Canadian in it at times, and I may have fallen into using some North American words but a couple of pints back in Inverness and the old accent and vocabulary is back. Where possible, my trips home are timed with one eye on the football calendar as much as anything else. Over here, I have been a Toronto FC season ticket holder since they formed in 2007. I was actually committed to a season ticket in 2006 before the team was officially formed, before there was a manager, before the stadium was built and before we had any players. Much like supporting ICT, supporting another acronym like TFC has also been a roller coaster ride of epic proportions. I have seen lots of highs and lows with both teams, whether it was winning the Scottish Cup as an ICT supporter or winning the MLS Cup and Supporters Shield as a TFC supporter or finishing dead last as TFC or being in the Caledonian stadium the day we were officially relegated from the Premiership. The experience is different, but oddly, despite the difference in scale, and the fact that the owners of TFC have more money than we can dream of (they own TFC, The Toronto Maple Leafs, the Toronto Raptors and multiple concert and sporting arenas around the city as well as lots of other stuff) some things feel weirdly like they are happening in a parallel universe they are so similar. There are also another few ICT fans at TFC. Some I have converted as they are mates (including one boy who is also a West Ham fan - and West Ham did play the All-Star game in Toronto a few years ago BTW [link1] [link2] ) whereas one or two are actual ICT fans who have travelled back to Inverness (and to the cup final as well) to watch the mighty ICT! Perhaps @luvgravy will reappear to tell his own story. My son (12) is currently forging his own pathway in football. He was on the books with Toronto FC Juniors until COVID hit and after that programme did not get restarted afterwards, he now plays what they call 'Rep Soccer' over here . Rep is competitive football from ages 4-13, probably closest resembling the Inverness Street League ... but his team travel all around the Northern suburbs of Toronto so 1-2 hour drives are not uncommon. This summer we had tournaments in Niagara Falls and Montreal which were fun. We were just at his tryouts for the season that starts next month for his next age group (U13) and looks like he will get into what they call the High-Performance / Talented Pathway program. For me that means twice the cost and twice the travel as we may have to go as far as Niagara Falls (2.5hr drive one way) or Ottawa (4 hr drive one way) for games instead of just around Toronto, but he loves it. If he enjoys it and can develop his talent, then that's what matters! Realistically, he is more Messy than Messi and for some reason he supports Spurs and Real Madrid (mainly because of Son, and Vini Jr) but he will learn 😉! I would love to see him run out at the Caledonian Stadium in a Caley Thistle top as a player, rather than a mascot, which he did on that fateful day we were relegated, but there is a long road to travel before he does that for any senior team ... we can dream. Anyhow - will wrap this up now and say I am looking forward to reading more potted histories from others ...

Well well, another supporter south of the border...English too? I am a Crystal Palace supporter of 50odd years [and we have finally won something!], but have supported Caley properly [i.e. going to match] since 2013. How did I get here? It was the famous 'supercaleygoballistic' cup win against Celtic that first brought the club to my attention, I later fancied supporting a Scottish club, then a highland tour trip with my eldest daughter inc' a cheeky stop by our driver at the stadium sealed it [plus ICT playing in the same colours as Palace]. I manage two to three trips year up to either 'home' or 'away'. My wife sometimes comes up for the 'home' games I am doing an 'overnighter' which she enjoys and Inverness and the area is lovely. I live in South London, so usually fly from Gatwick, but also Luton [Thameslink helps] I have even taken the train to Edinburgh [from Kings Cross] and last January did away to Queen of the South [Dumfries] mid-week stopping at Carlisle. I once did an overnight Megabus sleeper from London Victoria to get to an early kick off Cup semi-final [we beat Virgil van Dijk's Celtic] , and have been known to get an overnight coach home after games near Glasgow or Edinburgh. My family laugh at how I like to plan the logistics of trips [how many modes of transport can I use], but I do love doing the away games as you get to see more of Scotland, and the away support is fab [Dumbarton away this year was simply superb]. I tend to plan well ahead to get good deals on hotels/fares. I have just retired but start University this month so funds are a little tighter, but I am flying British Airway to Inverness from Heathrow and back in the same day this November having got a great deal on fares! Our recent history has been chequered to say the least but things are looking bright again, I absolutely love supporting Caley and have been to three cup finals, along with trips to places like Dundee, Ayr, Livingstone, Airdrie, Dunfermline, Partick Thistle and Stenhousemuir [although it was Queens Park playing us...don't ask!], Covid cost me a trip to Kilmarnock, and gales cancelled my visit to Hearts. So welcome aboard, you'll enjoy the ride...maybe see you in East Fife next spring