Marvin Bartley Faces Livingston in Scottish Championship Clash

Marvin Bartley has not spoken to David Martindale since the day he walked out of Livingston. On Friday night, under the BBC Scotland cameras, he does not need a conversation to make his point.

The two men meet again in the Scottish Championship, their relationship reduced to opposite dugouts and a shared, awkward history. There will be no warm reunion at Ochilview, no catch‑up over old times. Just a manager who felt he had no choice but to resign, and a club that moved on without him.

A clean break from Livingston

Back in May, Bartley and his assistant Neil Hastings stunned Livingston by quitting after being told to reapply for their own jobs. They had stepped up in January, Bartley promoted from the backroom staff when Martindale shifted upstairs into a sporting director role. A chance, Bartley thought, to properly shape a team of his own.

Then came the request to reinterview for the role he already held. For Bartley, that was the line.

He walked away. And he has not looked back.

“No, I've not seen or spoken to Davie since leaving the football club,” he says. The explanation is brisk. Martindale has been busy rebuilding a squad. Bartley has been busy building a new life in a different part of the pyramid. Paths that once overlapped now run in parallel, deliberately distant.

The only senior Livingston figure he has spoken to since is chairman Calvin Ford, who sent him what Bartley calls a “lovely message” after Stenhousemuir dumped Livi out of the League Cup on penalties at Ochilview. Even that win carried a twist of emotion: the club that let him go, the club he immediately knocked out.

At the time, he admits, the whole episode hurt. The shock was real.

“When the situation happened, I was really, really shocked,” he says. As he spoke to more people around the game, he realised others were less surprised than he was. That, he reflects, told its own story. “I was maybe a little bit naive and green. That's probably just me as a person. I take everything at face value.”

The sting has faded now. “Right now, I have got no kind of feeling to it,” he insists. “It's just another chapter in my book and I'm just continuing to try to do the best I possibly can for Stenhousemuir.”

Stenny’s unlikely surge

If Livingston represented an abrupt ending, Stenhousemuir has become an unexpectedly vibrant new beginning.

Nine games in all competitions. No defeats. A part‑time squad that refuses to play to type. Stenny sit looking down on the rest of the Championship after three wins and a draw, their latest statement a 3-1 victory over Inverness Caledonian Thistle last weekend.

This was supposed to be a survival scrap. Instead, they have started like a team that never got the memo.

Bartley inherited a club on the rise. Gary Naysmith had already delivered promotion from League 1 before departing for Ayr United, leaving Bartley to take the reins of a group that knew how to win. He has not wasted that platform.

A sharp League Cup group campaign set the tone. Then came a scalp: Premiership side Motherwell beaten, a reminder that this part‑time squad can live with full‑time opposition. Hearts await in a home quarter-final next Friday, another test, another chance to stretch the fairytale.

Before that, though, comes Livingston. Glenn Whelan’s side have started the league campaign with two wins and two defeats, still searching for rhythm. They now run straight into the form team in the division, guided by a man who knows every corner of their club.

Dreaming within limits

Scottish football has seen this film before. Arbroath, part-time and relentless, took Kilmarnock to the wire in a title race five years ago under Dick Campbell. The Red Lichties proved that ambition does not need a full-time budget.

So the question hangs over Ochilview now. Do Stenhousemuir dare to dream of something similar? Or even more outrageous – a double promotion, all the way to the top flight?

Bartley does not bite on the fantasy. Not yet.

“Every club in the pyramid now dreams of one day being in the top flight,” he says, and he knows that includes his own. But he keeps dragging the conversation back to the plan set when he walked through the door. The targets agreed then have not shifted, even as results have.

“We've got that target and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out what that target is because everyone had us as favourites to go down in this league,” he points out. The bookmakers and pundits expected a struggle. Four games in, those predictions already look shaky.

He will not allow the table to seduce his players.

“We can't get carried away with thinking about promotion or play-offs or anything like that because this league is unforgiving,” he warns. The focus, he insists, stays on hitting the internal goals they set in the summer. Achieve that, he argues, and it would be “a minor miracle” given the financial gap between Stenny and every other club in the division.

Friday night brings more than just three points. It brings a measure of where Stenhousemuir truly stand, and a reminder of how quickly the game can turn.

For Bartley, it is not about settling scores with Livingston. The real statement would be keeping this improbable surge going long after the cameras have gone.