The winning penalty hit the back of the net and it was chaos.
With nine men - eight at one point - Inverness Caley Thistle had somehow managed to see off Arbroath to clinch a place in the Premiership play-off final. Players and staff were celebrating wildly on the Gayfield pitch. Kirk Broadfoot was half naked. But when the camera pans to the away dug-out, Billy Dodds sits motionless.
He’s got a tight grip of assistant Barry Wilson beside him. And through the darkness, you can see the emotion written all over his face. The embrace only lasts a few seconds. But it was a special moment for Dodds. In a 30-year playing career, he’d never felt anything like that. This wasn’t just about winning a football match. It meant more than that. While there was carnage around him, he quietly thought about family, about life, about defying the odds.
And about the total vindication of his decision to become a manager. It was 100 days ago but it’s still fresh in his memory. Dodds says: “I just sat, calm. I was thinking about a few things and Barry was the same. He’d lost his mum, who was a good football woman.
“It was those sort of emotions. I was thinking about stuff that has happened in my life too.
“The game itself felt so unjust. I couldn’t believe what I’d watched.
“The effort my players had given me was incredible.
“I watched the first few penalties but for Broaders’ one, I didn’t look. Barry had to let me know.
“It was a different emotion to anything I’ve experienced before, because I’m older, I suppose.
“It’s not like being a player when you’re young and carefree.
“This was an older, wiser emotion. It was about perspective and life experience.
“I don’t run up and down the touchline like Mourinho? That’s not my style.
“It’s not wrong, everyone shows their emotions differently.
“I just wanted to take it all in that night because my boys gave me everything.
“It was a great moment, I had a lump in my throat.
“I felt as if my team had got us to where we deserved to be, against all the odds.
“They’d run through a brick wall for me. How we stayed in the game, I don’t know.
“But I kept saying to them, at full-time, at half-time in extra-time: ‘Give it your tank and we’ll win it - because there’s something happening here. We’ve been badly treated but it’ll be our night’.
“Was the players’ attitude the biggest vindication of my management? There’s no doubt.
“You have to make tough decisions with players but it’s about how you handle them.
“I tell them the truth because that’s all I ever wanted as a player, honesty.
“You have to speak to them like men. I don’t get everything right but I learned from my playing days.
“I had one or two managers who weren’t straight with me.
“You have to see it from both sides, imagine how the player is feeling.
“You can’t just give it big licks because you’re the manager.”
Dodds could have been Dundee United gaffer in 2006 but didn’t get the job.
Instead, he became a highly-rated assistant coach to Gordon Chisholm and then Jim McIntyre.
But at 52, he was finally given the chance to be his own man by Inverness last year.
He’s never shouted about it but Dodds always had a burning ambition to be a manager.
The former Aberdeen, Dundee, Rangers and Scotland striker said: “I’m glad I did it the way I have.
“I’ve always said I wanted a shot at management and I was close to it a couple of times.
“But if I’d got the Dundee United job back in the day when I was just out of playing, I’d have been snapping at players constantly.
“I’m more chilled now and understanding. I talk to players more and use my experience.
“Fairness is probably the right word. I have to be hard on them at times but you can’t lash players too often - they switch off.
“I’m glad I waited because it made sure I was ready for it.
“I was always a leader and my people skills were good. But handling players is different.
“If you start early as a manager you can be raw and dive into things.
“You might still have the player’s mentality where you want to go and fight with people and react.
“That’s not the right way. I think you can be too young for management.
“So being an assistant coach has helped me.
“But you always like to have a shot yourself. Now I make the decisions and it’s down to me.
“I always had a drive to be a manager. But I could never have stood on anyone’s toes, that’s just not me.
“I probably thought my time had gone and it wouldn’t have defined my life if I hadn’t.
“But I always knew I could do it.
“I’m ambitious. Just like my playing career, I want to see how high I can go.
“I worked as hard as I could to get as high as I could as a player. I’m no different now as a coach.
“If a bigger club wants to come and take you, of course you’re ambitious.
“I want to have a go at it because I’m like any human being, you want to go as high as you can.
“What that height is, I don’t know.
“Now that I’m a manager, I’d find it hard to go back to just being a coach.
“If a huge club came along and it was someone I knew, I wouldn’t rule it out.
“But it would be weird now going to another club and not being the one making the decisions.”
Between his spell at Ross County and his current gig, Inverness has become Dodds’ home.
After the play-off final defeat to St Johnstone in May, he’s as determined as ever to lead the club to the Premiership.
But at heart, he’s still a Cumnock boy who still regularly visits his mum in Ayrshire.
He said: “I’m still down the road a lot.
“We go down to see my mum and sometimes I’m in Glasgow.
“People seem to think I’m from the north east of Scotland because I played with Aberdeen and Dundee United.
“People say to me, you’re a north east boy. But naw, I’m just a wee bam from Ayrshire!”
HE was branded a Judas and a traitor by Dundee fans who blocked a return to Dens Park.
But Billy Dodds says he’s now glad that he didn’t go back to his old club four years ago.
In 2018 when Jim McIntyre was appointed Dark Blues gaffer, he tried to take his long-time assistant with him.
But Dundee supporters voiced their anger and rallied against the move to stop it happening.
They were still raging at Dodds for voting against a CVA while the club was in administration.
Both he and boss Gordon Chisholm were made redundant and lost out financially as a result.
It hurt Dodds and McIntyre at the time but the current Inverness Caley Thistle gaffer says it was a blessing in disguise.
Even though both of them are in jobs right now - at Caley and Cove Rangers - he hasn’t ruled out working with McIntyre again in the future.
Dodds said: “It never felt like the end for me and Macca.
“At the time, I was gutted. But when I reflected, I just thought: ‘Move on from it, if that’s the way it’s going to be - you don’t need it’.
“We always spoke about getting back to working together again.
“He thought he’d go into Dundee with me.
“Was I angry? I was more disappointed at how I’d been portrayed.
“And I would do the same again. There were guys at Dundee who were the real culprits but it got spun on me.
“They can blame me all they want but that 's not the truth.
“Other guys walked away from there with a cigar while I was left to face it because I wanted in with Jim.
“It was a club who did a lot for me in football. I scored a lot of goals for Dundee.
“But by the end of it, I probably dodged a bullet given what happened.
“It wasn’t fair on Macca because he didn’t get to bring in who he wanted.
“He didn’t get the best chance to make the best start there.”
