Ayr 19s Strange Encounters of the Airdrie Kind

The 19s suffered their first defeat of the season after a strange encounter at Prestwick Academy.

Ayr dominated the early encounters and had some good goalscoring opportunities through Baird, Paterson and Moore on a couple of occasions each and it came as no surprise when the home side opened the scoring on 25 minutes, when a defence splitting Crawford pass found Moore, who drove in on goal and fired into the net.

In true football fashion, a team are at their most vulnerable when they have just scored and the Ayr lads found this out to their cost, losing two goals in the next seven minutes and despite going close on several more occasions through Paterson and Connolly, the half-time score remained 2-1 to the visitors.

Ayr started the second half strong again and had some more unbelievable goalscoring chances through Paterson, Moore, Connolly and Crawford. Again the home side were punished for not taking their chances and found themselves 3-1 down when Airdrie broke up the park and scored.

Ayr's next opportunity fell to Moore and when he rounded the keeper he was brought down for a penalty but picked himself up to score and made it 2-3.

The home sides domination continued and Baird drove in from the right beating three opponents before setting up Connolly, who saw his shot saved by the keeper. This miss again proved costly as Airdrie countered and scored to regain their two goal advantage on the 71 minute mark.

Connolly was next to trouble the Airdrie defence and a good run into the box saw him upended for a second penalty. Moore again converted the spot kick for his hat-trick.

As Ayr were pushing for an equaliser, Airdrie finished the game off, scoring again in the 90th minute to make it 5-3 for the away side.

Coach Stevie McMillan commented afterwards, "The result was a disappointment but the performance on a whole wasn't. We created over 30 chances, which at any level is incredible. The boys will hopefully learn a lot from this game, knowing that offensively they need to be more clinical and defensively, they need to be stronger, make correct decisions and win their individual battles. On another day we could have scored lots of goals, but a mixture of lazy finishing and an inspired goalkeeping performance from the Airdrie keeper kept the scoreline down. There were many good individual performances today, especially Dale Moore who got a well deserved hat-trick for his all round workrate and performance."