EXTRA TIME A POSSIBILITY

I guess those watching the Premiership play-offs who are not supporters of Caley Thistle or St Johnstone will be hoping Arbroath prevail.

I can understand that – the prospect of Dick Campbell and his Red Lichties in Scotland’s top flight is an intriguing one to say the least.

However, I am an Inverness fan and this old pessimist felt good about his team’s chances as the semi-final first leg kicked off on Tuesday night.

We have done pretty well against Arbroath this season and there was no reason we couldn’t do that again. I wasn’t anticipating there to be a lot between the teams over the two games, but I felt we might just have enough quality to get the job done.

Having said all this, my confidence took a bit of a knock in a first half Arbroath controlled pretty well. They didn’t give Inverness any time on the ball and carved out a couple of half-decent chances.

A spectacular Logan Chalmers effort which rattled the bar was the only thing to get the Inverness fans excited.

No goals at the break, but you felt it could have been worse. Something needed to change for ICT, because Plan A didn’t seem to be working.

There is no doubt Inverness improved after the break and they had their chances to score. Sadly, they couldn’t take them and at the end of the evening a draw was about right.

Arbroath will now be feeling really good about their chances, but this semi-final is very evenly poised. It could still go either way – and I think it is very tough to call.

It could go all the way to extra time and I wonder how those part-time players in the Red Lichties squad would cope with that. Inverness will need to be better tomorrow and Billy Dodds will spend a lot of time working out how to create more of a threat up front.