Up for grabs at Easter Road is a place in this year’s final of the CIS Cup. “The league is the survival of Dunfermline Football Club, that’s what pays your wages, keeps everybody in a job,” claims Leishman, but he adds: “To lead a Dunfermline team into a final? I’d be greetin’. It would be up there with my two bairns being born. That would be the third biggest thing in my life. This is my second home.”
Leishman played for Dunfermline before injury cut short his career, and was manager during their own surge from the old Second Division to the Premier Division in the 1980s. He returned after his escapades with Livingston and oversaw a great escape from relegation last season. A final is all that is missing for him.
It is different for Makel. For a start, he was very much a part of the Livingston team that lifted the trophy two years ago. In the run to Hampden he scored three times, and was a key player in a side unrecognisable from the one he will face this week. Only Roddy McKenzie, David McNamee and Emmanuel Dorado remain of the 11 that began the final for Livingston. “We went into administration a couple of days before the semi-final (a last-minute, 1-0 victory over Dundee). It was very strange, there were no celebrations afterwards, nothing at all,” says Makel. “The final was a great day, though, the first final I had played in. There were 30,000 Hibs fans while we only had about 10,000, and I think half of them were Hearts fans.”
As the team broke up, Makel left for Plymouth in the summer of 2004, before joining Dunfermline, his ninth club, a year ago. Now 33, he doesn’t have Leishman’s emotional attachment to the Fife club, but he was signed to help keep them in the top flight and has been one of their best players during a wildly-oscillating season.
“We said to the players at the start that this was going to be a season of highs and lows, so let’s try to limit the lows and get as many highs as we can,” says Leishman. “We stayed up last year. It didn’t amazingly get us another 40 or 50 investors, or get us another £1m investment. What it gave us was another year to try and get everything sorted out.”
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Dunfermline’s peaks have been higher and more frequent than Livingston’s; a victory over Celtic at Parkhead and a draw with Rangers. In the CIS Cup they have done for Gretna, Kilmarnock and Hibs, a tough route to the semis. Both Leishman and Makel agree that the winner on Wednesday may have an edge in the second half of the league season. “Winning games adds to confidence so it is a massive game,” says the midfielder. “If we can get through to the final, it will help the boys for the rest of the season, no doubt.”
Certainly for Leishman, the competition provides a welcome interlude. “We have had a lot of negative publicity and both teams now are in the limelight for the right reasons, and it’s a great feeling. But I disagree that it’s us or them. Falkirk are in it. They’re easy caught. We are all still to play each other so I think it’s more than us and Livingston.”
Not on Wednesday night, though, when fears of relegation are replaced temporarily by dreams of Hampden.