Livingston’s on-loan midfielder Sam Stanton did his ‘parent’ club Hibs a massive favour yesterday scoring the winning goal against Falkirk.
The ‘Bairns’ were firm favourites to take all three points to consolidate second place in the Championship with Hibs not playing due to international call ups.
Falkirk could have gone nine points clear had they won the game however the Lions produced a fine performance to secure the victory although the Bairns almost produced a sensational come back in time added on.
With 15 minutes remaining the score was locked at 0-0 then Jordan White gave Livingston the lead. Staton appeared to have wrapped things up moments later however Will Vaulks pulled a late goal back, and in a thrilling finale, Marc McCallum saved John Baird’s penalty with virtually the last kick of the game.
Rangers have virtually secured automatic promotion and the race for second place is likely to go to the wire. Falkirk remain six points clear of Hibs however Alan Stubbs’ men have three games in hand.
The pair meet at Easter Road next month.
Afterwards Livingston manager David Hopkin told BBC Scotland:
“There’s real belief and team spirit.
“We need to make sure we keep that going until the end of the season.
“We had a game plan and it worked really well, but at 2-0 up we switched off.
“We’ve got fantastic energy in the team. We’ve got a young team, and we’re trying to build something here.
“We’ve not done anything yet, hopefully we can just keep going and keep everybody fit.”
Falkirk boss Peter Houston said: “Livingston came and did a job on us, and you’ve got to give them credit for that,” he said.
“Our tempo was really low and poor, we wanted to play the perfect pass and get in behind, but they flooded the area. The quality wasn’t good enough.
“It’s a lesson for us that if we want to get second place we can’t go about games in the tempo we did in the first half. It was too lethargic.”
Photo by John Preece
John graduated from Telford College in 2010 with an HNC in Practical Journalism and since then he worked for the North Edinburgh News, The Southern Reporter, the Irish News Review and The Edinburgh Reporter. In addition he has been published in the Edinburgh Evening News and the Hibernian FC Programme.
