Marvin Bartley will walk out at the Tony Macaroni Arena on Friday night with the TV cameras trained on him, the away dugout his new home and an old chapter parked firmly in the past.
He has not spoken to David Martindale since the day he left Livingston.
No phone call. No quiet catch‑up. Nothing.
“I've not seen or spoken to Davie since leaving the football club,” the Stenhousemuir manager says. The words are flat, matter-of-fact, not barbed. “He's busy, I'm busy.”
The subtext hangs there anyway. This is not just another Championship fixture for the BBC Scotland audience. It is the first meeting between Bartley and the club where his first crack at management ended abruptly in May, when he and assistant Neil Hastings said they “had no option but to resign” after being told to reapply for their jobs.
Back then, the shock was raw.
“When the situation happened, I was really, really shocked,” Bartley admits. In the days that followed, he was hurt. He had stepped up from a backroom role in January when Martindale moved upstairs into a sporting director position. He thought he knew the ground he was standing on.
The more he spoke to people around the game, the more that ground shifted.
“The more people I spoke to about it – and the more people that found out about it who weren't shocked – probably made me realise that I was maybe a little bit naive and green,” he says. “That's probably just me as a person. I take everything at face value.”
That bruising exit could have lingered. Instead, he has turned the page.
“Right now, I have got no kind of feeling to it. It's just another chapter in my book and I'm just continuing to try to do the best I possibly can for Stenhousemuir.”
If Livingston was the sting, Stenhousemuir has been the salve.
The part-time Warriors have ripped up expectations in the opening weeks of the season. Nine games in all competitions, still unbeaten. Three wins and a draw from their first four Championship matches. Top of the table, looking down at clubs with bigger budgets, deeper squads and more established reputations.
Last weekend brought a 3-1 win over Inverness Caledonian Thistle, the latest marker that this is no early-season fluke. Before that came a sharp League Cup group campaign and a statement victory over Premiership side Motherwell. Hearts visit Ochilview next Friday in a home quarter-final that would have sounded fanciful when Bartley walked through the door.
He only got the job because Gary Naysmith, the manager who had dragged Stenny up from League 1, left for Ayr United. It felt like a difficult act to follow. It now looks like a platform Bartley has seized.
The chairman at his old club has noticed. After Stenhousemuir knocked Livingston out of the League Cup on penalties at Ochilview, Bartley’s phone buzzed. A message from Calvin Ford, wishing him well. “Lovely,” as Bartley puts it. A small gesture, but a telling one.
The contrast with the silence from Martindale is obvious. Bartley does not dwell on it. He has a different fight now.
On Friday, his side go up against a Livingston team under Glenn Whelan that has started the league campaign with two wins and two defeats. Livi are adjusting to life back in the Championship, still working out what they are after years of punching above their weight in the top flight.
Stenhousemuir, by contrast, know exactly what they are: the underdogs with a puncher’s chance.
Fairytales have walked this division before. Arbroath, part-time and relentless, pushed Kilmarnock all the way for the title five years ago under Dick Campbell. They turned a survival budget into a promotion race and forced everyone to rethink what was possible.
Could Stenhousemuir do the same? Could they go even further and complete a scarcely believable double promotion, straight from League 1 into the Premiership?
Bartley hears the question. He refuses to get swept along.
“Every club in the pyramid now dreams of one day being in the top flight,” he says. “There's still so long to go and it's a boring answer for you all, but when I came into the job we spoke about what we hope to achieve and that's not changed.
“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 and we understand we are only four games into it.
“We can't get carried away with thinking about promotion or play-offs or anything like that because this league is unforgiving.”
He circles back to reality: resources, budgets, the cold numbers behind the romance.
“We're thinking about achieving our goals and if we do that, that's a minor miracle in itself when you look at the financial constraints we have compared to every other club in this league.”
So the narrative on Friday will be painted as Bartley v Livingston, the reunion with Martindale, the man he has not spoken to since walking away. The cameras will lean into it. The build-up will frame it.
Bartley cannot control that. What he can control is the team in claret and gold, the part-timers who have turned hurt into hunger and expectation into fuel.
If this is just another chapter, it is already one of the more compelling in his book. The next few months will decide whether it becomes something else entirely – the season Stenhousemuir stopped surviving and started rewriting the script.
