Gillingham face one of their longest trips on the season on Saturday as they head to Cumbria to face AFC Barrow with John Coleman still looking for his first Gills win since taking over.
Speaking to KSN at this week’s briefing about the closing of the transfer window, Coleman admitted, “I wasn’t that stressed to be honest! A lot of work has been done since we came in and in the build up to the window, the recruitment room has been very, very busy!”
“I get that the fans will say that we haven’t been scoring goals, that’s our Achilles heel, we don’t score enough goals, we haven’t signed a striker!”
“But we have signed two attacking players in the window, I don’t think that our problem is scoring goals is down to personnel, I honestly don’t,” Coleman told us.
“Our problem scoring goals is the philosophy and the identity that we have got at the moment, and the over reliance on going backwards, rather than going forwards.”
“I have been trying to change that since I came in, I thought I would be able to change it quicker than I have.”
“The fact of the matter is that if we don’t start playing the sort of football that I want to play, there has to be drastic changes and we have enough of a squad to make drastic changes.”
“If or when we make those drastic changes and it still doesn’t make any difference, I will bring different players into the team!”
“Gillingham Football Club and Gillingham fans deserve a team, certainly one that attacks teams and goes forward, not just once or twice, but the feeling for me is that we are not dominating games, we’re not getting on the front foot, we’re not sustaining enough attacks.”
“We’re not getting like we did in the first twenty minutes against Doncaster where we kept them pinned is like they were being suffocated – we have to play on the front foot.”
“I do believe that that is the problem. Now we could have signed ten strikers in the window, but I think that you have to be mindful that you can’t just keep topping up the pot!”
“The top scorers who could make a difference are not going to be available in January, and you could easily fall down the mine shaft of signing players and spending good money on players that are not really worth it.”
“You do have to be mindful of that, we have wonderful owners in Brad and Shannon (Galinson) and they deserve to have their money used wisely, and that’s not saying that it hasn’t been used wisely in the past, but what I am saying that going forward, every single signing that we make has to make a difference.”
“Some signings you do take punts on people – as a League Two club, in general, a lot of your signings do have to be punts, but you can take educated punts, but you can sign players on lots of money and then pay the consequences long term!”
“So, I do get that the fans would have loved to see a striker, I would have liked to see a striker who I thought would make a difference, but there was no way definitely that I was going to sign a token one, and sign someone for the sake of saying that I have brought a striker in and then being reluctant to use him.”
“We have to change the way that we play and if we are going to score goals, we have to change the way that we play, and that is the brutal truth and that’s what we will continue and continue and continue to focus on!”
“We’ve spent all week in training how to do that and hopefully we will get the results that we hope we can get. In every conversation we’ve had, you know that I am not happy with the way that we play, but I can still see signs that there is something there; we just have to get it into them, and myself and Jimmy have been doing that for twenty-five years, and there is no reason that we are going to stop now.”
Asked about his team news for the weekend and Coleman told us that he has a full squad to choose from in Cumbria, with the possibility of the new players who arrived on Monday in the match day squad.
Meanwhile, Conor Masterson, the manager told us is seeing a specialist this week on his ongoing injury whilst Marcus Wyllie is still a couple of weeks away from fitness.