Airdrieonians 2 Vs. 1 Hamilton

First division Airdrieonians defeat Championship Hamilton in the opening round of the Ramsden’s challenge cup with goals from man of the match Willie McLaren and Nathan Blockley. In an enjoyable and entertaining match. It helped the result went our way.

It's tough to judge a team by the opening game of any season so I'm going to try and leave any predictions about how i see the season going out of this report.

The teams lined up

I’m very glad a friend of mine picked up a team sheet before kick off, it seems to be a familiar tale, the start of a new season brings a whole host of new players’ names to learn. Some will stick some won’t but going by today’s match I think a few of these will at least leave a memory.

The opening minutes of the match belonged to the Championship team as it took Airdrieonians a little while to find our feet. We weathered the storm but as we began to match Hamilton we got caught by a sucker punch.

Louis Longridge struck from outside the penalty box, it looked like the defence had it covered but the shot spun of one of our defenders and crawled in to the back of the net. Colin Stewart was blindsided but many thought he could have made more of an effort. If that was considered a mistake it was really the only one of the match.

Eighteen minutes gone and Hamilton were 1 – 0 and now Airdrie were under the cosh, we lost our shape and Hamilton began to dominate. Until that was a sublime Willie McLaren brought the ball down turned and shot and made the match even.

Both sides battled for the winner but it wasn’t until close to the sixty minute mark that Airdrie got the winner. A long throw by Jamie Bain was headed home like a bullet by Nathan Blockley, the Hamilton defence followed Lewis Coult and Jim Lister to the near post leaving space for Blockley to fire in the winner.

So the opening game of the 2013 – 2014 goes the way of the Airdrieonians, this time last season I was saying how we had won but Hamilton dominated, this time we put in a strong performance and battled harder than I’ve a seen us battle in many a season. An enjoyable game and good result.