Clyde v Arbroath

Recap

Clyde suffered another frustrating afternoon at Broadwood today, as Arbroath claimed a narrow victory in Ladbrokes League 2.

With Ross Perry and Phil Johnston ruled out by injury, Barry Ferguson gave Marc McKenzie a debut and also added fellow recent signing Ryan Finnie to the starting line-up.

The match had a bit of a scrappy start, with the visitors causing some problems for the Clyde defence with decent deliveries into the box.

However, the first clear-cut chance fell to David Gormley when he was able to pull down a McKenzie cross, but the forward blasted the ball over the bar.

Minutes later, the visitors capitalised when another cross caused a scramble in front of John Gibson’s goal and the ball was eventually bundled into the net by Colin Hamilton.

The Bully Wee should have been at least level before half-time though, as three more good chances were passed up. Peter MacDonald couldn’t get a clean connection on the ball inside the box, Gormley put a header over the bar and McKenzie sliced a volley wide at the back post.

Early in the second half, The Red Lichties missed a great chance to extend their lead when Bobby Linn opted to chip the ball over Gibson and it was the wrong choice, as the ball sailed over the bar.

On 65 minutes, Clyde levelled the score when Ewan McNeil’s excellent run and cross found MacDonald and he placed a neat header past Ricky Gomes.

With Clyde now in the ascendancy, the match turned again after a serious of incidents in close succession. What looked like a clear foul on Gormley at the edge of the box was missed by the officials, leading to Finnie being shown a yellow card for simulation. In the next passage of play, Finnie was then penalised for a soft foul and was quickly shown a second yellow card for kicking the ball away in frustration.

To make matters worse, Arbroath scored from the resulting free-kick as Linn’s whipped cross was nodded in by Ricky Little.

Linn then missed an excellent chance to put the result beyond doubt, but Clyde’s difficult task of getting back into the match with ten men proved fruitless, with MacDonald denied the chance to go through on goal when the assistant referee raised his flag at Gormley, despite him not touching the ball.