Brechin City1–0Formartine United

The game at Brechin ended as a narrow 1-0 win to the home side. They had already played both Dundee and Dundee United among others and were looking to fine tune their game to start their season. Despite this it was Formartine who called most of the shots earlier in the game. With two trialists (Joe Macpherson at right back and Calvin Roddie in midfield) and new signing Ryan Stott – formerly of Cove Rangers - on from start they gelled reasonably well from the outset. Brechin struggled at least initially with the powerful direct, hard running style of Graeme Rodger in the middle matched the cunning, but more languid style of Stuart Anderson. This state of affairs persisted rather longer than from Brechin's perspective, it should have. The home side's anxiety was raised significantly in the 19th minute when Rodger after a trademark burst through the middle managed to get the ball into the net. Even without the advantage of VAR the referee spotted an infringement and denied the goal.

That was something of a wake-up call for the home side whose tempo increased to the point that they began to impose themselves on United. Under this pressure Formartine's lack of match practice began occasionally to reveal itself as more passes went awry and fluency dropped. It was marginal to begin with but in stiffling heat (enough for water breaks to be used) the less fluent side has to work the harder to keep going and inevitably the need to use workrate to offset errors was energy-sapping. They still made a very good fist of things showing grit and resilience in doing this and deservedly went in level and goalless at the interval.

Being a “friendly” there was no restriction on the number of substitutes allowed and using this to the max, Brechin all but replaced the “hale shebang” to ensure fresh legs in pursuit of a win that would be crucial to their morale. In the end they got it. They were increasingly dominant but struggled, more from lack of guile than anything else, to breakdown a dogged United.

It took until them until the 79th minute to get their noses in front. After a period of pressure Kalvin ORSI got enough space to get in the header that yielded the game's only goal.

It says something about the determination of this United side that they kept the deficit to a single goal and that they all but matched at team from a higher league who were at the final stage of pre-season preparation when they were right at the beginning of their own.