The most important eight days of the season?

By: Ian Rose | October 24th, 2008

I won’t go and whine too much about the schedule this week, not when fellow Offside blogger Matt’s Celtic team has a lot worse run of games, playing five games in basically two weeks. Still, tomorrow we start a tight, and absolutely critical, part of our season.

It starts at home against Motherwell on Saturday. Last season, the Well came to visit in the height of their fantastic 2007 form. They didn’t just beat us – they absolutely dominated us, in our own house. David Clarkson was brilliant, netting one in each half. They were a completely different class on the day. This year, of course, things are a bit changed. Motherwell has had a dreadful start to the season, and the UEFA Cup campaign that was their reward for their brilliance last season went completely up in smoke.

But truth be told, Caley looks none too sharp either. Readers of this blog (and I flatter myself by using the plural … readers) know my thoughts on this. Our crossing, shite. Our finishing, shite. If you read the Caley Offside, you also know that I’ve been keeping track of how our points rack up to last season’s, and if you look at the same fixtures year-to-year (granted with a very unfair comparison of Hamilton to Gretna), there’s some trouble. We need to start picking up points we didn’t pick up last season. This is one of the great opportunities to do that. It’s not a must win … but it feels a bit like one.

Then, on Tuesday, another big game. A League Cup quarterfinal against a very mortal Falkirk side that sits currently dead bottom of the league. It’s a very real chance at a cup semifinal, and for a club like Caley, a cup run is an important thing. Celtic and Rangers fans might think of it as the wee diddly cup, but to us, it would be a big deal. It might very well define what could be an otherwise very forgettable season.

Then we come to next Saturday. Caley Thistle starts November in Glasgow, at Ibrox. As I mentioned last week before the Celtic match, Old Firm games mean a lot to us. They, like the cup, are a chance for single matches to be memorable for seasons to come. Especially after the travesty that was the Rangers traveling support for last year’s opener in Inverness (I know, I was there), we are no fans of the blue side of Glasgow. This is a big one.

So, three games in eight days. In the first, we could really use a win, to get back some confidence at home and reverse the poor comparisons with last season’s fixtures. The second is a chance to get closer to getting our hands on some hardware. And the third is a chance, once again, to put our stamp on the league by getting a result against one of its titans.

Big week. I’ll be back tomorrow to sum up how the first bit of it went.