Stubbs Pleased With Livingston Win

Following the disappointment in the Scottish Cup semi final, head coach Alan Stubbs has said he was delighted with the character of the players as they took a three one victory over Livingston last night to keep the battle firmly on for second place in the Championship this season.

In quotes carried by the Edinburgh News following the game, Stubbs was pleased to see the side bounce back to winning ways and close the gap on Rangers to a point and he now feels the race for second place will certainly go down to the wire.

With Falkirk to face Rangers, he was obviously asked if our Scottish Cup opponents could do us a favour this time round.

‘As long as we win our game we`ll then see how other results turn out. As long as we win our game then it is going right down to the wire.’

Not going to be overly drawn into Falkirk comments again obviously.

As for the Livingston game itself and our performance, Stubbs went on to say that with the disappointment of the loss given how we dominated the game, the players could’ve felt sorry for themselves but he was pleased to see them step up and show the determination to take victory again and get back to winning ways.

With that said, he also admitted that he didn’t really expect them to react any other way though.

‘They could easily have felt sorry for themselves and for there to have been a bit of a hangover but I thought the way we went about things was good on a difficult pitch. Maybe at times we over-elaborated or made the wrong decision but in the main we tried to play, everyone did their job.’

A good performance didn’t mean we had it all our own way though, as we had to take the lead twice in the game, our opponents went down to ten men and sat back and of course Dylan McGeouch missed from 12 yards.

‘The sending off took the sting out of the game for them. We were in more control and probably could have won it 3-1 a lot earlier than we did. But even after they equalised I still felt we would create chances and scoring right after it was obviously a good thing. Livingston showed a lot of spirit as their recent results suggested they would, they are fighting for their lives but to have won the way we did makes it a great result.’

With the race for second place still the aim, Stubbs did say however that confirming the play off spot was far more important that the final make up of the league for him.

‘If we can win our last two games we will see what happens. I don`t think there`s a huge amount of relevance to finishing second, I`ve got to say. We`re still going to try and finish there, it would give us an extra week and maybe we might try and explore doing something with that. But Rangers are in the driving seat. The lads have been brilliant all season – I`ve got to commend them. They`ve got to a semi-final of the Scottish Cup, the quarter final of the League Cup and they have done what our objective was – if we couldn`t get up automatically, then get in the play-offs. They deserve a lot of credit and we need to collect ourselves for that final push now.’