HAMPDEN BUILD-UP: Dodds – 'Our lads can stand with legends'
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Forget Darvel. Forget Berwick Rangers knocking out a mighty Glasgow Rangers side in 1967.
Forget, even, the famous evening a six-year-old Inverness Caley Thistle went ballistic against Celtic and brought John Barnes’ managerial career crashing.
If the Highlanders somehow muster victory over Ange Postecoglou’s formidable forces at Hampden Park on Saturday, Billy Dodds is convinced it would set every one of the Scottish game’s great cup upsets in the shade.
The Ayrshire junior club’s earlier round triumph over the Dons was held up by some as a persuasive new candidate in the “greatest-ever category”, given Darvel’s sixth tier status and Aberdeen’s Europa League budget.
It can be argued, though, that Saturday’s occasion is set apart by several unique factors – the setting, the circumstances and the stakes.
Unlike the lengthy list of shocks to strike Scotland’s premier cup competition, the Caley Thistle manager must plot victory at Hampden Park itself, and in the full glare and international spotlight of a final.
Not only that, Dodds and his players must do it against a team hurtling towards a historic treble.
Celtic occupy an entirely different financial universe from northerly opponents who struggled against losses of £835,751 for the 12 month period up to May 31 last year.
Equally, this is a season during which Dodds and his staff have grappled with an injury crisis so severe that it literally halved their playing squad for weeks and months.
All the while, Celtic kept international calibre stars kicking their heels on the bench.
They flirted with relegation concerns at one point in the campaign, before restored fitness and replenished numbers fed a late-season surge that took them agonisingly close to another Premiership play-off finish.
For Dodds, it has been rollercoaster stuff, epitomised by getting knocked out in the fourth round by Queen’s Park only to be restored because the victors fielded ineligible Euan Henderson.
Dodds, who has experienced national cup finals as a coach with Dundee United, Queen of the South and Ross County, also won the big three trophies as a player with Rangers.
Victory on Saturday evening would be up there with many of his career domestic and international highs.
Asked how a Hampden victory, given the setting and circumstances, would compare to past shocks, Dodds said: “I think it could eclipse Darvel against Aberdeen.
“The cup competition is all about fairytales, miracles – and it has happened already this season.
“And if it happens again, personally, it would be brilliant for me, but it would just typify my bunch of players down there in the dressing room, and what they have in them.
“To nearly reach the play-offs this year, given what we experienced, was incredible. I knew they had it in them once the squad was fit, but they still had to win the games.
“I was telling every man and his dog that we’d win games when I got my players back, but it might have gone the other way.
“We might have lost games and I look like a fool.
“But I knew they would come good. We got to the Ayr game and ended up losing out, that can happen, but the players pulled off a minor miracle to get there.
”I’m hoping to do the same in the final.”
Dodds uses the word ‘fairytale’ on several occasions, but also points to hard, objective evidence for feeling certain a victory for his team – while unlikely – is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
The stadium walls in Inverness are peppered with pictures of the club’s 2015 triumph albeit in an era when they were a top four or five Premiership club who secured Europa League football.
He said: “I think people remember the fairytales. You just have to look downstairs and see all the boys on the wall when Inverness last won the cup.
“I know it was against Falkirk, but they beat Celtic in the semi-final.
“Of course things like that are always remembered, and quite rightly so.
“Any provincial club who wins the Scottish Cup, or wins a trophy like Ross County winning the League Cup in 2016, has a right for it to be remembered.
“We do take inspiration from past successes.
“For me, clubs put that kind of memorabilia up on the walls because they want the next generations to aspire to it.
“It might be generations before you win it again, but we have got an opportunity.
“That’s why they put it up on the walls, because they want players of this generation to walk past it and think ‘I want a bit of that.’
“It has got to inspire the players.”
Dodds and his team faced an inactive month after failing to make the play-offs, but filled it with a hard-earned nine days off and matches away to Dungannon Swifts and back home against Nairn County.
The Inverness manager acknowledges it wasn’t ideal preparation in some ways, but also that it had more than a few positives.
They will be rested, fresh, hungry – and fit – against the champions, if around 4,000 supporters down on what they hoped.
The late kick-off time and travel issues, as well as high ticket prices, have deterred some less fervent fans and hard-pressed families from venturing south.
Dodds feels aggrieved at how the Scottish football has deferred to England’s FA Cup final.
He stressed: “I don’t think we’d have been handing as many tickets back with a 3pm kick-off.
“We’d have probably sold another couple of thousand tickets.
“Whether it was the kick-off time, whether it was the travel, or whether it was ticket prices, it has certainly affected our fans.
“I’m not saying we’d have sold 20,000, but we’d have definitely sold our allocation.
“The kick-off time is disappointing. I’m not going to shrink and hide from it.
“As a player, with what this competition means, I’ve always been brought up that the Scottish Cup is your showpiece – as a young boy and then whether I was playing or coaching.
“I’ve been involved with Dundee United and Queen of the South in a Scottish Cup final while coaching and I’ve won the cup with Rangers.
“I’d have been disappointed on any of those dates - player, coach, manager - if it wasn’t three o’clock.
“It is our country’s showpiece. Should we just hide behind the fact English football has a bigger profile? Just accept that?
“Not for me. Get it out there. There is one half of the Old Firm and ourselves. People want to watch the game.
“It is our showpiece so to move it? Pretty poor, I’d say.”
