Inverness Athletic captain wants historic cup win as motivation for league title success
CALUM Neil says winning the Football Times Cup has given Inverness Athletic greater confidence they can go and achieve further success this season.
Now the 28-year-old centre midfielder says the squad are looking to use that as a bench mark and aim to continue their challenge for the title in the 2024/25 campaign.
Athletic are set to face Alness United in the North Caledonian League at North Kessock on Saturday in their final game before the winter break.
Despite being in fourth place and 15 points behind current league leaders Halkirk United, Athletic do have five games in hand on the Caithness tabletoppers.
With their title challenge still within their own hands, Neil says winning the Football Times Cup says has proven to Athletic they can go all the way in competitions.
He said: “Every game is a must win when you are trying to challenge for the title with Halkirk and Invergordon.
“They don’t slip up very often, we are five games behind Halkirk and they have the points on the board. We have a target in trying to catch them.
“It has become a four horse title race with Golspie, Halkirk and Invergordon and every game is a must win if you want to win the league and hopefully we will be up there.
“Winning the cup shows us what is possible and we can go all the way in competitions. Hopefully it gives everyone motivation to go and win more silverware and look for success this season.”
In the final, Athletic went behind after just eight minutes when Iain Ross gave Alness the lead. But they took control with strikes from Dominic Macaulay, Michael McRobert and Luke Mackay to seal victory.
Despite going behind early on, Neil, who works as a quantity surveyor, says his team didn’t panic and was always confident they could salvage victory.
He said: “We were the better team over the 90 minutes and I think we were deserved winners as 3-1 was a fair result in the end.
“It has been a common theme for us going behind us this season.
“But we have done well in most cases to come back and get a result. Nobody was in panic mode when we went behind. We just looked to get back as soon as we could. That is when everything swung in our favour.
“When Luke scored in the 90th minute we knew that was it and we had a good celebration afterwards.”
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