History
The Highland League's largest and most successful club, Caledonian won the competition eighteen times- a record they held until they ceased to exist in 1994. Another Inverness side, Clachnacuddin, equalled this record in 2004. The club's greatest period of league and cup success was in the early 1980s when they won three successive titles under manager Alex Main, a journalist who also wrote the club's centenary book 'Caley All The Way - The First Hundred Years' in 1986. The club won the prestigious Rothmans Football Yearbook Award for outstanding non-league club in 1981-82, Rothmans describing them as one of the outstanding teams of their grade in Britain, let alone Scotland.
Caledonian, like other Highland League clubs, were prevented from making the step up to the Scottish Football League due to the lack of a pyramid system. It was largely believed amongst Highland football fans that self-interest amongst Central Belt league clubs held back the prospect of opening up the league to northern clubs, with the perceived long and difficult journeys to the Highlands being cited.
Despite these handicaps, Caley qualified for the Scottish Cup many times, knocking-out larger League clubs on a total of 19 occasions. Notable achievements included knocking out First Division Airdrieonians in 1990 and in 1992 embarking on a run to the fourth round, defeating league sides Stenhousemuir (4-1), Clyde (3-1), before taking Premier Division St. Johnstone to a replay, eventually losing 3-0 in Perth in front of a crowd of 10,000.
Read more about this topic: Caledonian F.C.
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)