They are renowned for their consistency of selection but Charlie Christie, the Inverness Caledonian Thistle manager, has revealed he is prepared to make changes to his side as the season reaches its climax.

With mathematical magic required to pinch a top-six slot, the manager is aware that the likelihood of some of his squad slacking is high, with little to play for in the final few games. But he is determined that his side's third season in the Bank of Scotland Premierleague will not end in a whimper.

"I have told the players that I will start to rotate the squad towards the end of the season and that only those who are playing well will keep their places," Christie said. "That should be an incentive for them to finish the season on a high and to remain focused on all of our games from now on.

"Also, the higher you end up in the league the more money you win, and the players know just how important it is for the club to do as well as possible from a financial point of view.

Hopefully we can do something similar to last season when we stayed in seventh place and won our last five matches following the split.

"We are now in a group of five or six clubs who all appear to be evenly matched and who can beat each other on any given day. That wasn't the case when we came into the SPL and were only concentrating on avoiding relegation."

The campaign to finish top of the bottom half begins with the visit of Dunfermline today. As well as being adrift at the bottom of the league, the Fifers have never beaten Inverness CT in the league but really need to do so now if they are to retain hopes of staying up.

Stephen Kenny, the East End Park manager, insists that his side are remaining positive and have not given up hope quite yet. "We're determined enough to go up and put in a good performance. Performances have been decent enough but we just need to have that killer instinct.

"That's the most important bit. Dunfermline have never beaten Inverness since we came into the Premierleague and we haven't won away this season so we have to try to break both of those records. We're looking to this game and not making any statements about what we need to do and what we want to do."

Should his side somehow stay up, the manager aims to take inspiration from what the Highlanders have done in the past few years. "I have a lot of respect for what Inverness have achieved," Kenny added. "They seem to be everybody's bogey team because they seem to beat everybody. They've shown the importance of a really terrific team spirit and a blueprint for a lot of smaller teams."