Reaction

This game turned on a needless penalty ten minutes into the second half, when Michael Dunlop handled the ball in the area after being blinded by the sun, then in the next minute Livingston doubled their advantage when Raffaele de Vita scored the first of his two goals on the day. Undoubtably we can look back to having done well in the first half and having the best opportunity to go ahead but Bryan Prunty’s effort was brilliantly saved by Tony Bullock, however Livingston won the game well in the second period, although 4-0 was cruel on The Wasps but another reminder of how easily we have been losing goals this season. Next weeks game against East Fife will now be a massive game as the team look to collect more needed league points. Scott Walker will not be available next Saturday as he starts a period of a two match suspension.

ALLAN MAITLAND ON ALMONDVALE COLLAPSE

That is one of the strangest games I have been involved in for ages, anybody picking the paper up on Sunday morning will see that as a 4-0 hammering but that was certainly not the case – when we played our first game against Livingston in the opening league game of the season there was nothing in it, the game ended 3-3, in the second game at Recreation Park it ended 2-2 and at half time today it was 0-0 there was nothing again to separate the teams, then the second half today we had situations when we gave the ball away twice on the half way line and inexplicably give opportunities to Livingston, the opening goal coming from a penalty out of the blue when one of our players, Michael Dunlop, inexplicably punched the ball in the box at a stage when it didn’t look like we were under any real pressure in the game, the goalkeeper hadn’t had a save to make and then we just started to make all the wrong decisions. To be fair I thought Livingston’s finishing was absolutely excellent, very clinical, picked out the right players – Iain Russell, Raffaele De Vita and Bobby Barr, but it came down to their finishing was better than ours, the first half Bryan Prunty had two great opportunities to put us ahead, Tony Bullock made a great save for the first chance and then the second one was pulled by the post. You feel at the moment the way things are, had these chances fell to Livingston, their would have taken the lead – so difficult day for us, the score line reflects very badly on us and even at 3-0, why we then charged up the park and looking for a goal in extra time only to be caught out on the counter attack again with the pace of Bobby Barr, we opened up for them. It has been a difficult day, a 4 – 0 result and strangely enough and I do not think it was a 4-0 doing, so we must look to take the positives out of the game and move on to next weeks game. The situation is that we have been on a bad run of form up until the last couple of games and our confidence is fragile, so it was important for us to get in front today if that was possible, we had two great chances but it is not the fact that we lose goals but the matter of the goal we have been giving away, Mike Dunlop handling today in the box and then losing the ball on the half way line for the second goal, the two goals hit us so quickly that it knocked the stuffing out of the team to an extent but from our point of view there was lots of positives to take from the game – the first we played well, caused Livi a lot of problems and should have been ahead at half-time but we did not take our chances, into the second half Livingston again were able to show their depth when they took of Kenny Deuchar and Iain Russell and brought on Bobby Barr and Robbie Winters, you can see they have great quantity in depth and once they got their noses in front they played really well and deserved their victory.