Blog

My God.

Livingston coach David Martindale isn’t even bothering trying to disguise his allegiances any more as he jumped on to a Sevco fan podcast today, just two days out from his teams defeat to the team from Ibrox.

Martindale talked gushingly in the press about Giovanni Van Bronckhorst’s men in the lead up to the tie on Saturday afternoon, then couldn’t contain his smile post match when talking about “Wee Scotty Arfield” and “Tav” after his 2nd favourite team, Livingston, crashed to a 2-1 defeat after holding onto a 1-0 lead for most of the game.

Martindale has got plenty of stick for being a Sevco fan and his team has been criticised for lying down to Sevco when they play them and then trying their absolute best against Celtic.

From watching the matches particularly last season, it’s hard to argue against that.

Livingston seemed to play very open against Sevco last season and didn’t seem to worry too much about the defensive aspect of the game, even at Ibrox, yet against Celtic they put 11 men behind the ball in order to frustrate Celtic and have the best opportunity to take points off us.

I tweeted before the match asking if it would be too much to ask for Livi not to lie down to Sevco this time, and in fairness I don’t think they did. For once.

I have seen some criticism about them parking the bus and allowing pressure to be put on them after they went 1-0 up, but in fairness, that is what they are good at doing and they probably felt that was the best way to get at least a point out of the game.

But, if you are David Martindale and you are getting slagged for being a Sevco fan and gushing over their players, the last thing you should be doing is going on a Sevco fan podcast two days later!

It’s just totally unprofessional, and probably wouldn’t happen anywhere else in world football, certainly not in Britain, where a rival club’s manager goes onto a podcast for the opposing team.

Will the SMSM care? I doubt it. They’ll probably want invited on next.