Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Automatic promotion hopes gone
As is to be expected, Dundee United are refusing to concede anything in the contest for automatic promotion from the Championship.
After an agonising defeat at Livingston, though, if there is still a race for top spot in the second tier, it’s hard to argue the Tangerines remain involved in it.
Friday night’s 2-1 loss at the Tony Macaroni Arena means they trail runaway leaders St Mirren by a massive 17 points.
With just 13 games of the regular season to go it’s impossible to see how that gap can be closed.
And the harsh truth is that, on current form, the battle Csaba Laszlo’s team now face is to stay ahead of the teams below them and make sure they hang on for a play-off place.
A disastrous run of six league games since the end of December has produced just a single victory, against part-time Brechin.
The only other success during that period came in the Scottish Cup against League One Alloa — another part-time outfit.
That’s not a sequence that suggests this is a team capable of getting promotion even if, as should be the case, they do secure a place in the play-offs.
Right now, the most pressing question is where is the next win going to come from?
The chance to get one quickly will present itself tomorrow night when they run out at Tannadice to face Queen of the South.
Particularly on their own patch, that’s a fixture that’s proved tricky in recent times and, if a needed three points are to be taken, there is no question United will have to turn in a more complete performance than they managed at Livi.
With Ryan Hardie’s winner for the home side coming in injury time, there was a feeling in the away dressing-room they’d been hard done by.
Given what had been an improved display after the break, it was easy to understand why.
United had battled hard in that