“At the start of the year, I did many an interview saying this was going to be our toughest season in the Scottish Premiership.”
David Martindale didn’t need to be a psychic to know Livingston were in for a slog of a season. Saturday’s defeat at home to Hibernian marked their seventh successive league loss.
In their last six, they have failed to score – they are the first top-flight team to go on such a lengthy barren and beaten run since 1999.
Seemingly the league’s perennial surprise package since their promotion in 2018, their inability to defy expectation this season has become a shock itself.
Not for Martindale, though. His unique position as the unequivocal figurehead of the club – one in which he’s expected to fix goalposts and mend their fortunes on the park – means he foresaw the storm.
“I had the choice, I didn’t need to be here,” the Livingston boss told BBC Scotland. “But I chose to be here. I’m up for the fight. I’m up for the challenge.
“I’m pretty positive 100% of that changing room and my staff are all in for the long haul with me. Do we need to do better as a group? Absolutely. But I’m the leader of that group and I take full responsibility for that.”
‘Zapped and zestless’
Such honesty has come to be expected from Martindale. A reformed convict who openly discusses his time in prison, he’s very much an open book.
He has written chapters of success since taking over as first-team manager officially in December 2020, using the division’s smallest budget to turn Livingston into a well-oiled machine of grit, guile and gumption.
But as the pressure mounts, and the West Lothian side’s woes pile up week upon week, has the manager lost his spark?
“Martindale looks like the zest is out of him as a character,” said Sportsound pundit Michael Stewart. “That has definitely transferred on to the park. They just looked zapped of any kind of life.
“It’s dark, dark times for Livingston and Martindale. Everybody had got to the position they knew it was a foolish thing to [tip Livingston for relegation] because, by hook or by crook, they would get results.
“But you look at them now, they look devoid of any life. When you take that out of the team that was epitomised by that, there doesn’t look like there’s much left.”
What is left is a side who sit bottom of the Premiership – five points below Motherwell and St Johnstone – and look in danger of being cut adrift.
Livingston have scored the fewest goals – just nine in 15 games – in the division and have gone entire games without troubling or testing opposition goalkeepers.
From Euro hopefuls to ‘crisis’ club
At this stage last season, Martindale was pulling the proverbial rabbit out of the hat again. There was talk about Livingston booking a place in European competition, now their likely destination looks like the Championship.
The West Lothian side are averaging 0.7 points a game this season, comfortably their lowest in Martindale’s three-year tenure.
However, in that period, they have been a side that has grown into themselves from positions not too dissimilar to the one they are in now.
Their 10-point haul in this season’s Premiership is just two fewer than their tally at the same stage in 2021-22, a campaign which ended in them being comfortably the best team in bottom six and, through the quirks of the split, having the fourth most points in the division by matchday 38.
Martindale himself admits they’re in “crisis”. It’s one they can’t avert but must accept.
The siege mentality that has come from plastic pitch patter and ‘Spaghettihad’ slaggings must be emboldened beyond its previous limits.
Livingston have long relished being Scottish football’s underdogs. But as some fear, if this is a pack that has lost their bite, the days of punching above their weight could well be numbered.
