Cove Rangers manager Paul Hartley praised his players after they bounced back from defeat to struggling East Fife with a commanding 3-0 win against Clyde.
Goals from Connor Scully, Jamie Masson and Robbie Leith gave Cove the victory to keep them level on points with League One leaders Queen’s Park.
The best chance of the opening exchanges came after 18 minutes when Clyde striker David Goodwillie saw his brilliantly struck drive from distance beat home keeper Stuart McKenzie, only to crash off the crossbar to safety.
That effort apart, the visitors’ top scorer had one of his quieter 90 minutes in a game dominated by Cove, who took the lead on the stroke of half-time when Clyde’s defence failed to clear a corner and Scully blasted home from inside the area.
Cove doubled their advantage six minutes after the restart when Fraser Fyvie’s cross was flicked on by Mitch Megginson to Masson, who curled a wonderful effort round Neil Parry and into the net.
Right at the death, substitute Leitch completed the scoring, heading the ball beyond Parry after the keeper had parried his first effort.
Cove boss Paul Hartley felt the outcome was exactly what his side deserved.
He said: “I thought it was a professional performance, especially in the second half where we managed the game really well.
They didn’t cause us too many problems, the one shot off the bar apart but I thought we controlled the game.”
And it was exactly the response he was looking for after the previous week’s 4-2 defeat at the hands of bottom club East Fife.
Hartley added: “It needed a big reaction from the players.
“We let ourselves down last week and we didn’t perform as a team the way we can.
“We played well in terms of pressing the ball, our counter pressing and we had some good combination play and it was good that other players chipped in with goals.
“As a team I thought we were a bit more solid, our organisation was much better as was our discipline.
“We had a game plan in terms of how to keep Goodwillie quiet, he’s caused us a lot of problems in the past and I thought our two centre-backs worked really well.”
Former Aberdeen defender Shay Logan was named man of the match by the sponsors and he felt, unlike the previous game, everything fell into place.
He said: “We went out and did exactly what we trained to do all week.
“We scored late on in the first half but we definitely could have scored a few goals earlier on.
“It was really comfortable and a really good team performance.
“Goodwillie’s a good player, he was a team-mate at Aberdeen, you know what you’re going to get out of him and normally if you keep him quiet you keep Clyde quiet.
“He was getting frustrated during the game but I don’t want to take anything away from ourselves, we were very good.
“That’s definitely our best performance of the season, we haven’t played well, we’ve played well in patches but overall, for 90 minutes, we’ve not played well up until this one so, once we get going I believe we will be a real threat.”
