Martindale refuses to get hung up on survival talk

DAVID MARTINDALE refused to entertain talk of cinch Premiership survival after spirited Livingston secured a rare win to stave off the threat of relegation for at least another week.

The Lions would have been officially relegated if they had lost to second-bottom Ross County, but an early goal from Bruce Anderson and a Sean Kelly penalty gave them a 2-0 victory. It was only their fourth league success all season and moved them within nine points of County and 10 of 10th-place St Johnstone with four games to play.

Martindale felt his side merited “huge credit” for the way they performed, but he does not feel it signifies a major change in their predicament.

“It gives you hope but I’ve also got to be pragmatic,” said the Livi manager. “Winning isn’t going to change the way I think about it.

“We’ve picked up three points, we’ll come in Monday and get ready to try to win three points again next Saturday. We’re not delusional, we know how big a task it is in front of us. We only have ourselves to blame [for the league position] but the boys dug out three points and that’s all you can really do, try to win the next game in front of you.

“I’ve kind of put talk of relegation away. We know it’s there, we’ve spoken about it as a group previously, pre-January. It’s been hanging over our heads for a good seven months. But we don’t want to keep coming into work talking about relegation so you then focus on that next game, and that’s all I do.”

Martindale was in no mood for going overboard with the victory given that his team are still staring down the barrel of relegation.

“I’m probably a wee bit more positive than if we hadn’t won,” he said. “But am I happier going home in the car or waking up Sunday morning? You have to piece the whole season together and it’s been disappointing. That makes it extremely difficult to enjoy moments like today. You can’t pat yourself on the back for failure.”

Interim County manager Don Cowie admitted his side fell flat after their rousing 3-2 victory over Rangers in their previous match.

“It was really disappointing,” he said. “We rightly got a lot of plaudits after the Rangers performance and result two weeks ago. Today we were a shadow of ourselves from that game. We’re an honest group and it wasn’t good enough.

“We started poorly and gifted Livingston their first goal which gives them a boost. They kicked on and we didn’t respond.”