St Andrews United make history with first-ever Fife Cup win

Though they’re eight-time winners of the old Fife Junior Cup, the Saints had never got their hands on the senior version before or even made it to a final.

They ended that 105-year wait with a 3-0 victory against a Pars youth team overseen by John McLaughlin, with Neil Lennon looking on, in front of a crowd of 580 at their Clayton Caravan Park Recreation Ground on Wednesday night.

Home manager Greg Shields made five changes to the team beaten 2-0 hosting East of Scotland Football League premier division table-toppers Hill of Beath Hawthorn on Saturday, including cup-tied on-loan goalkeeper Thomas Margetts switching sides to play for his parent club, with Scott Bryson taking over between the posts, and Raith Rovers legend and one-time Pars loanee Jason Thomson returning to the hosts’ starting line-up.

Thomson, 38, went on to get the better of sometime teammate Margetts, 17, twice, on 24 minutes and 30, and Scott Dunn also got on the scoresheet on 67 to earn the Saints, skippered by Ryan McManus, their first piece of silverware for years.

Shields, a past winner of the cup with Dunfermline as a coach in 2019, beating East Fife 3-0 at home, was delighted to see his current side get the better of his old one after knocking out the Haws and Dundonald Bluebell, both away, en route, by 4-2 in October and 5-3 on penalties after ending up tied at 2-2 in March respectively,

“It’s great for the club,” said the 49-year-old. “It’s the first time they’ve won the Fife Cup. It’s always good to win a trophy and it’s good for the players as well.

“They’d won promotion to the premier division from lower leagues over the last three or four years but it had been a while since they won a cup.

“It’d been a hard task to get there with the draws we’d had, playing Hill of Beath away and Dundonald away.

“It had been hard to get to the final but overall we deserved to win.

“When you’re playing in a cup final, your priority is to win the game and it doesn’t matter how you play or how you do it, and that’s what they did and that was good.

“Albeit it’s the Fife Cup, I wouldn’t play it down – it’s a cup and it’s a win and it gives the players a taste of winning. Enjoying winning cups, regardless of what cup it is, can become a habit and it gives them good experience in their careers going forward.”

Making up the rest of the Saints’ starting line-up for Wednesday’s final were Tom Milne, Rian Dempsey, Kyle Sneddon, Alex McCreadie, Finlay Allan, Lewis Craik and Lewis Milne.

David Maskrey took over from Dunn on 70 minutes and Luke Murray from Thomson, Cammy Graham from Craik and Anthony Gillan from Allan on 83. Joe Aitken and Regan Lumsden were unused substitutes.

The Haws’ scorers at the weekend as they knocked their hosts out of this season’s EoSFL league cup were Sam Featherstone on six minutes and Conor Scott on 19.

Next up for the Saints, currently ninth in the premier division on 39 points from 26 fixtures, is a trip to fifth-placed Musselburgh Athletic this coming Saturday, with kick-off at 2.30pm, and they’ll be hoping to make amends for a 4-0 beating hosting the East Lothian outfit in November’s reverse fixture.