Saintees Versus Lions

Saturday saw the first game of the league and an away jaunt to the place where the Lions ended up last season, all the way up to Perth to take on St. Johnstone. At that game the Livi fans had the aim of keeping their manager in place which they did temporarily until the owner sold out to the new Italian Leone owners.

Meeting up before the game we went into the new Carling Italian Bar, the former Lions Den it has been transformed into an Italian bar from being a bit of durr Scottish pub, but while we were waiting we were getting news of all sorts of traffic problems on the Forth Road Bridge.


In the end we did set off to make the other pick ups and the M9 towards Sterling looked as jammed as we'd heard the bridge was so the normal crossing was taken and Mister Stephen and I entered McDiarmid Park just as the players were coming out unto the pitch.

The St. Johnstone back four drawfed our strikers but we did have pace. It was going to be fun to see how Signor Roberto's passing game was going to hold up against a tough Scottish opposition. The first half saw chances at both end put a couple of errors from Monsieur Pierre-Antoine in goal did give us travelling fans a few missing heart beats. We were just hoping that at some point our pace would tell with a cunning through ball along the ground beating the tall but slow St. Johnstone back guard. However, at half time the score was 0-0 and neither team was really looking to dominate the game if anything Livi were looking the more adventurous in how they were aiming to get to goal.

At the start of t he second half the Saints however came out like they were on a mission. Ten minutes into the half Peter MacDonald got on the end of a ball from a Gavin Swankie run to score for the home side. However, 4 minutes later young Mister Leigh was through and had beaten Liam Craig only to be brought down while the ref produced the inevitable red card. There was more heart in mouth moments for the Livi fans when a back header from Mister Chris found Monsieur Pierre-Antoine just outside his box and it appeared asleep, but he ran back just in time to stop the ball going into the net.

However, against 10 men St. Johnstone Livi seemed satisfied to pass the ball around without any real penetration into the Saintees final third and when in the final minute of normal time Chris Millar took on Mister Jason in the box, from where we were sitting it looked like Mister Jason won the ball but the ref pointed to the spot and Paul Sherrin fired home the resulting penalty for a 2-0 final score.