KILMARNOCK'S place in the Tommy Burns story has inevitably been overlooked, but the supporters of the Ayrshire club have never forgotten his huge contribution to their cause and yesterday they showed their appreciation. During his three years as a pl
ayer and then player-manager at Rugby Park before Fergus McCann whisked him away to Parkhead in 1994, he not only took Killie into the Premier Division but, against all the odds, kept them there.
Along one wall of the main stand sat a moving tribute to the great man, Killie's supporters leaving a wealth of flowers, scarves, tops and tributes. There was a minute's respectful clapping to mark Burns's passing, but his legacy xdemanded more and when the home side strung together their first decent passage of play, it was his name that the crowd sang.
That wasn't the only farewell at Rugby Park yesterday, although the reaction to retiring referee Dougie Freeland's departure was a little more ambivalent. There are some managers who won't miss the old whistler – Gus MacPherson once tried to have him sent off in one particularly fraught cup tie – but yesterday he was competence personified.
Not that this distinctly end-of-season game was difficult to control. Resigned to their league position, both sides did their best to play attractive flowing football.
It was ironic then that both of the opening goals came from dismal errors. It was Falkirk who profited first when the mercurial Pedro Moutinho ambled 20 yards to the edge of the penalty area without a sniff of a challenge and, as Killie's defence finally woke up, drove an accurate shot into the corner past Alan Combe.
But for all their neat interpassing, Falkirk lacked penetration and it was Kilmarnock, with Mehdi Taouil showing flashes of genius, who carved out the clearest chances, especially in the second half. Paul Dalglish was the recipient of three of them, but the poor striker was so severely out of sorts that he couldn't have hit Jim Jefferies' backside at two paces. His early miss when put clean through on goal by the revitalised David Fernandez was one of a trio of car-crash misses before he was finally put out of his misery by the arrival of Paul Di Giacomo.
With Danny Invincibile seemingly desperate to show how many decent chances he could miss (answer: somewhere into double figures) it was left to Taouli to bring Kilmarnock back on to level terms halfway though the half when error-prone Falkirk keeper Robert Olejnik juggled the Moroccan's weak shot back across his own line in comedy capers fashion.
Kilmarnock dominated utterly after the break, with Falkirk not coming close to a shot on target. Despite Invincibile's heroic efforts to preserve the deadlock, with eight minutes to go Di Giacomo finally presented the home side with the win they deserved when he rose to head down Jamie Hamill's cross from the right wing, his weak header somehow just making it past Olejnik and going in off the post.
The full article contains 526 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
