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Congratulations to Mark Ridgers on breaking the club record of 67 career clean sheets with ICTFC! Surely our best ‘keeper we have had and a great servant of the club.

I think we need to mix it up a bit. Lining up with the obvious won't work imho. Therefore agree with above fully

Given the influence of Nicky Low, is it time to play three in the middle to tighten things up and ensure we are competitive? It would mean a 4-3-3 / 4 5 1 type flexible formation so we would need to play with one up top but have the midfield needing to get up in support. If Allardice is fit to start, I’d put him in alongside Welsh and McAlear with one of them playing deeper to support the defence and allow the full backs to push forward when the opportunity arises. The problem is who drops out. Logically Mckay or Samuels so we keep the width of Chalmers and Sutherland.

We need to get a hold of midfield, and if that means five in the middle, so be it. The team also continue to use the long punt forward, just for the opposition centre backs to win the ball, and start another attack. I don't see Dodds screaming at the team to stop it, so he must be happy with it. All our best moves and chances were created by passing the ball on the deck, that's were we will win this game in my opinion, get hold of the midfield and feed the attacker. I really think we can win this, but not with the futile long punt.

And what about Les Fridge.

Kelty are doing okay though... Hughes is a charlatan of a manager though. Fantastic if your manager has been poached for doing a good job but trying to save a team from relegation he is utterly hopeless. I had a look over his signing record at ICT and I'd say it's at least 95% garbage. He just cannot identify the right players to save a side that is fighting to beat the drop. Dunfermline fans have been bemoaning his pass - pass - pass - HOOF style for months now. As much as they had a bad start under Grant the Pars were a mere 3 points from safety when Hughes took over. He had ample time and budget to turn things around. It's said that the Dunfermline board provide him with advances on money earmarked for next season to try and save them. Yet again he pisses the extra cash he receives up a wall or rather on a boatload of central midfielders.

The offer sounded a bit fishy to me anyway.

Despite Jordan White scoring at Ibrox against his big team (whaaat?), DUFCs point v Celtic tonight, and Motherwell’s win against Hearts, means that, to paraphrase Derek Adams, “The Beach Balls are Burst”. So the wee team OTB will finish the season in 6th spot, having taken 1 solitary point in the top six so far, and won’t be following ICT’s feat of 2015 when we finished 3rd and had a nice jolly abroad. Shame…

I say, who wears the trousers in your house? You clearly will be wearing the apron at the BBQ. Whereas Kingsmill and I will be wearing our masculine pink shirts together at that time.

I thought Danny Devine was superb last night. I wasn't overly happy when we signed him but in fairness to him he had been really good this season.

The first half was pretty grim viewing from an ICT perspective. Arbroath were well on top and completely stifled our midfield. Their pressing was relentless but, as we saw against Killie, they eventually run out of steam. By the hour mark they had 9 men behind the ball sitting in protecting their lead draw. In the first half our best chance fell to Chalmers with that thunderous effort off the bar but Arbroath definitely had the better opportunities as we looked very weak defensively. (Jack) Hamilton and Nicky Low had the best chances for the away side. Second half was a different story. As Arbroath tired we grew into the game. We weren't having to play panicked long balls forward and had more time on the ball to pick a pass which obviously suited us a lot more. Chalmers and Samuels had the best chances with the former flashing an effort just beyond the post and the latter denied by a good save from Gaston although I can't help but feel if he had connected with the shot more sweetly it would have gone in. I felt we were quite conservative with our approach to the game. Deas, marauding down the left at Firhill last week, seldom got beyond Chalmers on the left (in the first half) although he did have a marauding run in the second period. Carson got forward bit more as the game went on but without support from the full backs we seemed to be awfully narrow. Sutherland was a non entity for most of this one after his recent good form and Mckay had very little service to work with so it was no real surprise to see him come off though I do feel that Dodds pulled the trigger with the subs too early as Arbroath were running out of steam and I felt more gaps were appearing for someone like Mckay to take advantage of. Low was very good for Arbroath, pulling the strings at the base of their midfield but he also ran out of puff and when he went off we dominated the middle of the pitch. Even so, some of our passing was still out of sorts and some our set piece delivery was abysmal. You'd imagine Arbroath, backed by around double the number of ICT supporters that turned up last night (that's a sad indictment of support for this team in Inverness) will be all over us from the start on Friday. However, if we can keep them contained then perhaps we can sneak a goal later on if, as last night, they start to fade into the second half. That said, Arbroath have outscored their opponents 3:1 in the second half of games at Gayfield and have bagged a ridiculous 9 goals in the last 15 minutes of games there. So perhaps we can't rely too much on them tiring as they did last night as the game goes on... Finally, shout out to Tam O'Brien and has laughable attempts to try and get McAlear sent off for, erm, standing next to him. The way he feigned contact and started rolling around ont he ground was a pathetic sight from one of the best players in the league this season.

I say, that would make it my favourite number. Chortle, chortle

Memo to the kit man. Friday evening in front of the cameras in beed of a win. It has to be the pink strip.

We grew into the game and, in the end, were unfortunate not to take a narrow advantage into the second leg on Friday. However, there is no getting away from the fact that that first half hour was horrendous, horribly reminiscent of some of the worst of our mid season slump and we were very lucky not to concede at least one during that spell. We kicked off our campaign against our fellow Championship clubs with a win at Gayfield and there is no reason why we can't conclude it in the same manner, especially if we are backed by a few hundred noisy travelling fans. However, we need to get into our stride much much more quickly than we did this evening. 0-0 and all to play for. Let's make ourselves unpopular with the rest of the football community by ending the Arbroath dream on Friday.

As long as we don't persist on lumping big balls into Joe, as effective as tits evolving on fish