“There was no malice in it at all, and now it’s going to cost both teams,” judged Allan Preston, the visiting manager. “David was trying to get out of the way.” Jim Duffy, his Dundee counterpart, was in concordance. “A little bit of common sense could have prevailed there,” he said. “It’s not two players punching each other, it’s a tangle.”
The red card debate, or rather lack of one, couldn’t camouflage the austere dinginess that had preceded it. Dundee are seldom flash these days, but even so it was perplexing to see them toss a measly crowd a performance that bluntly refused to spark.
Their strike force alluded to producing more than was actually forthcoming, John Sutton upholding the family name with a ruggedly rumbustious performance and Lovell squirting through the Livingston back line at regular intervals. When he swayed past, however, his finishing was weedy. On 25 minutes, he scurried onto Iain Anderson’s craftily-weighted pass to clang a shot off goalkeeper Derek Soutar’s legs with the rest of the goal hollering.
Livingston had a more convincing balance to them, Burton O’Brien orchestrating their play from the centre of midfield. When he wasn’t composing chances himself he was looking to add their finishing note, as midway through the first half he fed off Colin McMenamin and cuffed a post with a positioned finish. That was pretty much that for the opening period. The home crowd seemed unfathomably energized by a Sutton header that trickled past the far post, only for it to be revealed that the din was emanating from a recording on the PA system. The one man on the pitch who had them enraptured for real was Claudio Caniggia, the feted former striker who returned to conduct the half-time draw.
Dundee’s disjointedness if anything increased after the interval, and the hour mark passed without the manufacture of a further attack. Preston’s troupe preferred to circumvent the chaotic jetsam of the central areas by focusing their efforts on the flanks. O’Brien picked out Derek Lilley heading for the left, and the striker flickered a cross at McMenamin lingering in the middle. The ball fractionally escaped his flashing header.
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With Dundee drooping in the final third, it fell to their right-back to lug them into the vicinity of the scoresheet. Calum MacDonald, wholehearted throughout, nearly added a sheen of grandeur to his display by swinging a shot inches past from the edge of the penalty area.
Still, it was the visitors who rounded off more imposingly, Lilley hurtling Goran Stanic’s cross towards goal with his forehead, only to find Bobby Mann clumping across to block on the line.
STAR MAN: Calum MacDonald (Dundee)
Player ratings: Dundee: Soutar 7, Smith 6, Sancho 6, Mann 7, Steve Lovell 6, Sutton 6, Anderson 6, Brady 6 (Larsen 84min, 5), Barrett 5 (Fotheringham 63min, 5), MacDonald 7, Robb 5
Livingston: McKenzie 7, McNamee 6, Stanic 7, Rubio 6, Kernaghan 6, Dorado 6, McMenamin 6, O’Brien 7, Easton 5, Lilley 6, Stuart Lovell 5
Booked: Stanic (15min), Steve Lovell (58min), McNamee (75min)
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Sent off: Steve Lovell (90min), McNamee (90min)
Referee: H Dallas
Attendance: 4,387