Formartine left bruised after an jaggy encounter with Buckie Thistle
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Formartine United 1 - Buckie Thistle 5
After getting a bit of a roasting from Brechin in midweek, United faced Buckie who had a bit of a point to prove.
United had been rather fortunate to see off Buckie’s progress in two years’ worth of Aberdeenshire Cup competitions [seasons 20/21 and 20/22 -fixtures conflated by Covid restrictions] in less than a month.
That was recent enough for the visitors still to be smarting and it was clear from the start that they were going to take care of unfinished business and proceeded to deliver a fair tonking to United. They began with a press in the first minute and sustained it until Demus did well to block a fierce Urquhart drive before pulling an awkward swirling cross from Macleod from the junction of his left post and the bar.
Buckie were crisp and fluent in almost all that they did and won more than their share of second balls.. It’s not that their effort and work rate, excellent though they were ,was particularly superior to United’s; it was just that they were a bit sharper across the board.
United weathered the opening storm and by 15 minutes in were beginning to push back a bit. Both Lisle and Greig have pace and are willing to take on players directly.
Buckie generally managed to contain this by getting extra bodies in the way of their forward progress but nonetheless the tricky Greig still managed to get in two or three decent right to left crosses and Lisle, battling through the middle, had a couple of shots from the edge of box that went close.
In the 19th at the tail end of an attack that was all but cleared up, Greig got the ball cheaply out wide right, jinked forward a few yards and struck a cross to the far side of goal and LISLE out-jumped his markers to head the ball firmly past Main .
Buckie were after revenge and pushed hard at the home rearguard.
They were a bit sharper and harder in midfield and therefore able to provide a fair supply into forward areas.
The pressure yielded two goals in three minutes.
The first came as FRASER burst through the inside left channel and pinged home a neatly placed 12 yard effort in the 25th minute to equalise before after a couple of corners by McAskill, one from the right was scrappily cleared leaving a bit of a gap near the centre of the six yard box through which the tall figure of MURRAY was able to take his time to get down for an all but unchallenged diving header past Demus.
United looked like they were beginning to steady the ship before two minutes before the interval,
Max BERRY plunged a knife deep into their psyche with the crucial third.
Despite that blow United, shoring up their midfield presence ,went through their best spell of the game.
They forced Thistle onto the back foot for periods and generally gave as good as they got. Still at 3-1 a Lisle shot through a ruck of defenders rebounded from Main’s left upright and hoofed to safety by Morrison.
United looked more like they could achieve a respectable scoreline than win the game but that all evaporated in the 63rd minute when McLAUCHLIN managed an inside left run that took him
away from a couple of defenders giving him sight of goal from near the edge of the box from which he delivered a cracking drive past Demus.
United stuck to their thankless task right until the fat lady took a deep breath and with literally the last kick of the ball and following a goalmouth melee, MURRAY found himself at the left side of the box 10 yards out from the goal line with the keeper stranded beyond the other side of the goal ,and had the simple task of knocking the ball into an empty goal.
Mixed results show that rebuilding to the point of achieving consistency is going to take time and that bright interludes like at Brora are going to be interspersed with “doings” like this.
