Week 25 Friday 28th to Monday 31st January

Thoughts, competition picks, etc.

redone in decimal odds

While they have every right to be pissed off and frustrated, i find it hard to believe that Middlesbrough and Wycombe feel the need to sue Derby. I hope they both go on and have a shit end to their season. I'll be tipping against them most weeks now. Shit houses.

Sometimes you just have to

Our defence is fucking atrocious

Fair enough

League 2, do you mean? Because there seems to be no way we're staying in league 1 this season.

1) We've got absolutely no money. We wanted Bromley's manager Andy Woodman to replace Steve Evans, apparently offered 5k, got told to fuck off. Marc Bircham was another target who, according to rumours, has decided he doesn't want it. In the mean time, we're being managed by Steve Lovell, a club legend as a player, who we already sacked 3 years ago to bring in Steve Evans, assisted by one of our players who appears to have been made assistant manager purely on the basis that he's out injured for the season so we might as well get him putting the cones out on the training pitch to earn his money for the next few months). Meanwhile, the clock's ticking and the transfer window closes on Monday, if we do appoint anyone other than Lovell as permanent manager, unless they move bloody quick this weekend, they're going to have to work with what they've got as they're not going to be able to bring any new signings in.

2) Just about the entire squad is out of contract at the end of the season, we're under a transfer embargo (although "embargo is probably not the correct wording", according to the chairman) as a result of a loan we got last year to get through the problems caused by Covid, which is believed (although the club's not really providing clear information on this) to mean there are limits on the number of players we can have in the squad and the length of contracts we can offer.

3) There's an increasingly vocal number of fans who want the chairman out. It's starting to look like he's had enough, to be honest, and the club seems to be drifting

4) Crowds are dropping fast - on Tuesday we got just over 3200 against Shrewsbury, the same night Maidstone (a few miles up the road, but 3 leagues below us) got 3000 against Ebbsfleet. Another local side, Chatham Town (6 divisions below us) got a crowd of 1876 not long ago. When fans are turning out in those kind of numbers to watch non-league football rather than the only league team in the county, there's something going wrong.

Basically, there's a toxic atmosphere around the place at the moment. The Gills have spent near enough their entire history (barring a 5-year spell in the Championship 20 or so years ago) bouncing around between league 1 and league 2. Going down to league 2's not a disaster, it's happened before, it'll happen again. Even in relegation seasons, though, I don't remember things ever getting this bad. Everyone seems to have given up already, and we're only in January.