Livingston manager David Martindale hailed his sides togetherness as they overcame a red card to beat Aberdeen 2-1 and move 10 points clear of the relegation play-off spot.
The home side stormed ahead inside eight minutes through Ayo Obileye’s intelligent finish, with Alan Forrest firing home the second shortly after the restart.
Christian Ramirez pulled one back for Aberdeen with just under half-an-hour to play and the Lions were reduced to 10 men after Christian Montano was shown a second yellow card by referee Kevin Clancy.
Martindale said: “Fair play to all my players, I thought they were brilliant.”
“They were all in the changing room after the final whistle enjoying themselves. The music was on full blast and they thoroughly deserved it.
“We defended our final defensive third extremely well when we were down to 10 men.
“I put big Morgan Boyes in at centre-half and probably played a 5-4-0 at the end. Morgan got one of the goal-line clearances and headed a couple away.”
Martindale was able to tweak Livingston’s tactics after Aberdeen dominated the opening period.
“I thought for the first 15 minutes Aberdeen were far superior to us and we struggled to get to grips with the game at times.
“I got them in after 15/20 minutes and spoke to them and, when we managed to get our press done correctly, we looked after the ball much better in the final third.
“Last Tuesday night they were a bit unlucky against St Johnstone in losing a goal in the last couple of minutes. We had to lift the players and if it had happened again, it would have been a massive blow to them.”
Aberdeen manager Stephen Glass admitted his side were not good enough for large spells of the game and understood the travelling Dons’ fans frustrations as they made their feelings clear at both half time and full time.
He also opened up on the reasons behind leaving captain Scott Brown on the bench and about Joe Lewis’ absence from the matchday squad.
He said: “When they see a team that was pretty poor first-half they make their feelings known, that’s normal at a big club.
“Expectations are big, players have reputations on the line and so is mine. I’m under pressure every day of my life at this club. You want a team to produce results and performances that don’t encourage reactions like that. But when you produce a performance like that, you’re open to whatever’s coming to you.
“We’ve a game against Celtic then a huge cup tie next weekend. We need to protect Scott, he’s 36 years old and there’s going to come a time when he can’t play every week. We felt like today was a day when he needed a break. He should be OK for Celtic. Joe took ill so we’ll see where we are tomorrow.
“We just didn’t produce on the day and it’s happened too many times. We didn’t produce away from home again and we’ll get that chucked at us as well. We need to start putting it right pretty rapid.”
