Christmas period could make or break Inverness Caley Thistle's promotion bid, says Daniel MacKay
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Daniel MacKay believes the next few matches could prove make or break for Inverness Caledonian Thistle’s promotion aspirations this season.
The Caley Jags host Dundee in the Championship this weekend, before closing out the year with back-to-back away days in the league against Hamilton and Partick Thistle.
Currently, Inverness are towards the back of the pack in the mix for promotion and play-off places, but defeat to Dundee this weekend could see them fall seven points off the top four.
MacKay knows that he and his team-mates cannot afford to let the gap get too big if they are to stand a chance of charging back up towards the summit in the second half of the season, so the importance of good results before the turn of the year is not lost on him.
“At the start of the season you obviously set goals and targets, but with the way the league has worked this year every team has been up and down,” MacKay said.
“Not a lot of teams have put a properly consistent run together. They might have done it for four or five games, but you always seem to see in the Championship that whoever has the best start is still up there at the end of the season.
“We have to make sure we’re still up there after Christmas time. This next quarter will be massive.
“Then once you see where teams are, you can adjust and see what you need to work on, how many points you need to pick up.
“We have to be positive in our way of thinking, because that’s when we’re at our best. You could see the other week when we played Ayr, we were the better side.
“Obviously we need to work on things, everyone in the league does, and we need to become more consistent long term to push ourselves up the table.
“We know that ourselves, but with the circumstances the boys have been in it is very difficult to keep things going when things get tough and the gaffer can’t change things.
“Hopefully now we’re starting to get a few boys back we can kick on. The Christmas period is when you can win or lose the league, so we need to make sure we are still up there.”
Things have not been easy for ICT with so many players injured, and fit again MacKay believes recent criticism has been unfair, adding: “I think the boys have done really well.
“Some of the criticism has been really harsh. We’ve been playing with 12 fit boys against teams at the top of the table. Obviously we’ve had a poor run results-wise, but I don’t think the performances have been as bad as people have made out.”
