Buckie Thistle1–2Formartine United

Nobody ever seriously entertained the thought that Formartine would continue their run of holocausts inflicted on teams below them in the league against an improved and still improving Buckie team. A barnstorming second half performance overcame the deficits of a first half display where they had struggled to impose themselves on a determined and well organised Thistle side that had bits of quality studded about it. Hegarty and Cheyne gave excellent accounts of themselves in midfield and Kevin Fraser up top turned out to be a very slippery handful indeed.

Formartine’s formidable goal scoring record had clearly preceded them and Buckie set themselves out in two banks of four in a 4-4-1-1 formation to counter the visitors’ more aggressive 4-3-3. The two formations more or less cancelled each other out over the first period. Thistle with the extra body in midfield were generally able to occupy the visitors’ midfield enough to restrict the supply it was able to provide for Keith, Wood and Barbour. For the neutral this might have been quite absorbing but it was frustrating for Formartine and in particular manager Hunter who was serving out the first of a two game touchline ban on the naughty step up in the stand.

Buckie began determinedly enough and the game had a fairly end to end flavour to it and it was the home side who were the first to threaten when Hegarty from right midfield was able to feed Copeland with neatly threaded through ball that set him up for a shot from the edge of the box. Reid dealt with it successfully by throwing himself low to his right and grabbing the ball at the second attempt. There followed a spell of Formartine pressure round the home goal area. An overlapping move down the left by Smith and Barbour ended with the former clipping the ball diagonally towards the back post. There was a bit of a melee there before MacKinnon managed to hoof the ball to safety. Buckie countered and won a free kick in the 13th minute. From twenty yards out and a shade right of centre, Hegarty rattled it off the cross bar and the ball fell for Copeland in the inside left area. His drive was comfortably taken by Reid and the danger averted.

This near thing bucked up Buckie and they invested heavily in attack but Formartine had the nous and the skills to contain this quite effectively. The chief danger lay in the pace and trickery of Kevin Fraser and there was always the worry that he might just force an error in central defence, but to the credit of McKeown and Crawford this only happened once and by then it was too late to influence the result.

A precision free kick by Lawson was met by Garry Wood whose glancing header was cleared with some difficulty. By this stage, midway through the first period, a pattern of Formartine sustaining attacks for a shade longer than Buckie could was beginning to form but it was also clear that these Formartine attacks struggled to yield many shots on target. The normal pattern of relying on Wood to hold up the ball and release it to a team mate with a bit of space was being countered by sheer weight of numbers as the second bank of four supplemented the first to stifle Formartine’s supply chain.

Stalemate continued until the interval. Keepers were not worked very hard – a block with his shins by Reid after a drive from Copeland and a couple of simple[ish] takes from shots from Barbour and Rodger by Sim were about the sum and substance of it. Perhaps the best chance fell for Lawson when his vicious right foot drive cannoned off the knee of McKinnon and was diverted from its otherwise net-bound course.

The second half was an entirely different affair: Formartine seemed to have found an extra gear from somewhere and started to hammer away at the home defence straight from the opening whistle. An under -struck pass from Wyness was seized on by the alert McVitie and clipped smartly forward to Rodger who unleashed a powerful drive from the edge of the box. It did dip too but sadly not until it had just cleared the junction of upright and cross bar on the keeper’s right. However this was but a sampler of the revival and with a tempo higher than Buckie could securely contain it was only a matter of time before the deadlock would be broken and that it was odds on that Formartine would be the team to do so. Buckie were by this stage well pinned down and confined to the odd breakaway. It took just over fifteen minutes of this pummelling before the Thistle wilted. After a period of offence had been partly abated the cleared ball was picked up by Lawson and played left to Wood who did the hard bit of forcing himself and the ball past Wood and Macrae and breaking into the box from the left side. He worked the ball to Cammy KEITH who had cunningly switched from near post to back to receive the ball and drive it home from about 3 yards out.

Buckie didn’t like it and tried to retaliate and despite a five minute flurry of activity round the Formartine area, were unable to pull the fat from the fire. Formartine were by no means home and dry but they had a good grip on the game and it was going to take something new and different from the hosts to loosen their guests grip on the prize. This did not arrive and Formartine, sustaining tempo and shape considerably better than they had in the first half pushed and squeezed until they extracted another goal. A fairly sustained onslaught on the home rearguard yielded a free kick about thirty yards out to the left. Lawson’s right boot has more culture than Oxford and Cambridge combined [United that is] and was used to drive the free kick very precisely to where McKEOWN had just enough time and space to slot the ball carefully beyond the reach of Sim’s left hand and into the net to double the lead.

It looked as if Formartine had enough to hold out comfortably in control for the remaining twenty minutes. They did so without major incident for nineteen of them but something went wrong with communication/organisation in left central defence and FRASER slippery as a skate cashed in by jinking past keeper Reid who had committed or possibly over committed himself out left near the bye line. The striker got round him, withdrew enough to get a decent angle, and banged the ball home for a late consolation.