A NEW Highland tradition has recently been introduced wherein you praise and criticise a neighbour within the same sentence.

At least that’s now a thing in football as Inverness Caledonian Thistle captain Carl Tremarco heaped praise, sort of, on Ross County for the way they won promotion to the

Premiership last season.

Caley Thistle intend to follow County’s example, which according to Tremarco means winning dirty is fine by him.

He said: “County are the prime example of how to win promotion. They won the league by however many points, but you could argue they were probably the third or fourth best footballing team in the league. They won’t care.

“To me it’s not really much consolation we are the best footballing team in the league, because we are still in the league. It means nothing really. We know where we need to change – that’s probably the draws.

“We need to start converting draws into wins. We had 14 draws last season – if we can turn seven of them into wins, we win the league. It’s as simple as that.”

Inverness are at Tannadice tomorrow night where they lost an ill-mannered second-leg play-off last season, a game United did dominate. The men from the Highland capital have missed being a Premiership club. This season is huge on and off the park. Tremarco admitted: “Unfortunately, we have had two seasons in the Championship now. We don’t want to take it into a fourth.

“Hopefully it’s third time lucky, but we know what to expect. We have seen Dundee United for two years now, we haven’t seen much of Dundee but we got a good look at them on Sunday.

“After the first few weeks of the season we will know where we are as a team because we have got a pretty tough start. We have the two Dundee clubs, with Arbroath coming up as champions in the middle.

“That sets the marker. If we come away with three wins out of three, all the league looks at us.

“We will know where we are in the next few weeks.”