It seems Gillingham Football Club is in a downward spiral. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse after last season – it has. Last season, the management blamed a horrendous injury list for the side’s poor form, which very nearly saw us relegated. Now this season, with some new signings up front, we look just as bad. That’s not to say we have bought poor attacking players – Iwan Roberts and Darren Byfield have performed as well as can be expected in the current situation. Despite having vastly improved attacking power and a smaller injury list, Gillingham look no better than last season.
We have to ask ourselves why this is the case and I’m afraid it comes down to one simple fact – our management are not doing their job. Instead of performances and results, we’ve had non-performances and excuses. After the Brighton defeat, Andy Hessenthaler said the crowd at Priestfield had high expectations. For a start, he couldn’t be more wrong. Ask most of the crowd and I’d suggest the vast majority of them are probably expecting a relegation battle. In pre-season, chairman Paul Scally said we have a squad to challenge for automatic promotion, while Hessenthaler himself said he’s looking at the playoffs at the least. It seems the only expectations have come from the top, not the fans.
The squad has aged and no measures have been taken to phase in new players, either in the form of new signings or from our youth team. We have the players at the club, but they get their chance in the side on very few occasions – and they are the first players to get dropped in the wake of another poor performance. Hessenthaler’s treatment of Matty Jarvis, our most exciting young player since Jimmy Corbett, has been disgraceful. Here we have a lively, enthusiastic young player, who excites the crowd and shows real ability, yet he is dropped after one poor game. On the flipside, the captain, Paul Smith, has been at best average, at worst appalling, for the past two seasons, yet he has never been dropped by Hessenthaler. That sums up Gillingham’s problems in a nutshell.
If things continue in the same vein over the next couple of months, this season will be over almost before we’ve started. The insistence in players who simply can’t cut it anymore is sending us down. If we’re going, we might as well go down playing the youngsters. I think this is a commonly-held view – and while we all want to stay up, the majority of fans would not be happy staying up like we did last year then going on to have another season of depressingly boring football, devoid of entertainment such as attacking football, shots and the like. To fail to get one shot on target against Brighton says it all.
Hessenthaler HAS to make changes – and radical ones at that. Clearly his preferred way of playing, with his preferred players is nowhere near good enough to compete with the vast majority of sides in this division. Unless he makes some major changes, relegation looms – and that could spell disaster for this football club.