THIS match was fitful and frenzied, with both sides knowing they could have won a match played in difficult conditions of swirling wind and rain.

Rovers may well be the happier with the precious point, as Home Farm are in more desperate need of three, but ultimately it must go down as a point gained from a match either side could so easily have lost.

The game flowed from end to end from start to finish, with chances in the opening and final minutes and many between.

Rovers' Neil Candlish should have shown the way in the second minute, but miscued in front of goal from Marc Kenny's fine cross, and the ball was scrambled away for a corner.

Home Farm wasted the clearest chance of the first-half 12 minutes later when John Coady played Trevor Vaughan in behind the Rovers' offside trap only for the striker to inexplicably blaze well over with only Robbie Horgan to beat.

Horgan's opposite number, Robbie Forde, in only his second game for Home Farm since joining them from Galway, was to prove the hero for the home side with two excellent saves to deprive Tony Cousins early in the second half.

But prior to that Home Farm had to survive a scare in first half injury time when Brendan Place headed off the line from Kenny, and Rovers' skipper, John Toal, hoofed the rebound over the bar.

Forde's first crucial save came in the first minute of the second-half when he turned Cousins' close-range effort around a post. Then, on 64 minutes, Forde dived low to his right to palm away a fiercely-struck Cousins drive from 20 yards.

Coady forced Horgan into his most important stop of the match within two minutes when he cleared off the line with his feet from the Home Farm midfielder's shot after great work by Karl Gannon.

Gannon then almost had the last word when John Byrne touched an 88th minute free-kick to him some 25 yard from the Rovers' goal - but the shot cannoned back into play off the crossbar.