I NEVER THOUGHT I’D SEE LIONS CONTEST A TROPHY AGAIN
ALLAN Preston was assistant manager when Livingston won the League Cup in 2004 and rolls the clock back to the night manager Davie Hay finished up dancing on the table... LIVINGSTON started that cup campaign against Queen’s Park at Hampden. And I always remember saying to the players: ‘It starts here, let’s end it here as well.’ When you consider the turbulence of the season, that seemed pretty unlikely. The club went into administration just before the semi-final against Dundee at Easter Road. Normally we’d have gone to the Apex Hotel in Edinburgh to prepare. But we hadn’t been paying the bills. We hadn’t paid Docherty Coaches either and they kindly gave us a bus for the semi-final and the final as a goodwill gesture. We got a penalty in the 91st minute of the semi which Derek Lilley scored to get us to the final. Normally players would be jumping up and down, hugging or heading for a pint. But we had lost friends and colleagues, team-mates, office staff and young kids to administration. It was just a horrible situation. After the semi, I went home and had a cup of tea and a sandwich. Everyone was so subdued, it felt so flat.
The night before the final, Lee Makel’s father-in-law passed away. He left the hotel and everyone felt a bit down. George McNeil, the legendary after-dinner speaker, was our sprint coach. He saved the day by doing an hour and a half of stand up. In the morning, Lee came back and wanted to play in the final and the mood changed when myself, Billy Kirkwood, Paul Hegarty and wee Danny the kitman went to Hampden to put the strips out and start the preparations. Just as we got there, we went to the Hibs dressing room to give them an embroidered kit of ours as a keepsake. The Hibs kitman wasn’t there, but their groundsman was. And he explained that the kitman had forgotten the ‘We won the cup’ T-shirts and had gone back to get them. So we got straight back to the hotel and told our players they had already printed off their winners’ T-shirts. That was all they needed to hear. Hibs had some brilliant players coming through in (Scott) Brown, (Derek) Riordan, (Steven) Whittaker and (Kevin) Thomson, but that final was probably too early for them. The occasion got to them. Hibs started well but David Hay got into David Fernandez because he hadn’t been great in the first half. He then had a 15 to 20-minute spell when he was unplayable. Hibs players were bouncing off him. Derek Lilley scored the first goal and Jamie McAllister scored the second. We knew that Bobby Williamson teams
held a high line and we worked on players running from midfield and going one on one with the goalie. We never realised that Jamie would have to go from six inches inside his own half to go through and score. When we won, there was a famous picture of Davie Hay dancing on the table in the manager’s office. Myself and Billy Kirkwood stayed at the ground and slept with the cup in the manager’s room. At 5am, I called Grant Stott, the Hibs fans and Radio Forth DJ, and left a voicemail asking for I’m In The Mood for Dancing by the Nolans. He played the voicemail of me steaming on radio that morning. Winning the cup didn’t bring back the jobs of the people who lost them. But we won for them. And when you see how far Livingston fell down the leagues in the next decade, I never imagined a day when the club would have a chance to win a major trophy again. If Davie Martindale wins this cup and gets them into the top six he will be Manager of the Year for me. From where Davie has come from and what he has done, I think it would be absolutely remarkable. I played for St Johnstone in a League Cup final in 1998 and Saints are a club close to my heart. Either way, I am covering the game for BBC Scotland and hoping for a cracking advert for Scottish football.