Nearly six months to the day since the club drew 2-2 at the Stadium of Light, Gillingham return to competitive football on Saturday.

Albeit at a deserted Priestfield – as the new season begins in earnest with the visit of Southend United in the First Round of the Carabao Cup.

Speaking ahead of the game to KSN this week, Gills boss Steve Evans was naturally in good spirits and looking forward to the start of another new campaign – he told us, “Pre-season has gone reasonably well – we’ve come through with the majority of the group still making good progress towards their fitness targets that we’ve set them and we’re getting there pretty quickly!”

“I think like all clubs we’re probably two or three weeks away given previous time scales but we are where we are and we’ve got two games coming up that in many respects can be almost like pre-season activity before the real action starts when Hull City come to Priestfield on Saturday week!”

“Having competitive football before the League starts, I think is good for the players where they’ll get some competitive action where the result matters. The Carabao Cup supporters may not be aware that in the early stages there’s not a lot of prize money, so it’s always about the crowd generation or television revenue.”

“From our point of view, it’s not as though we’re losing prize money if we’re not successful in it, but we’ll host Southend – we’ll take no risks with any players who might be feeling anything whilst still being as competitive as we can and win, and the same will go for Crawley in the Football League Trophy on Tuesday.”

“It’s important that we get used to the surroundings again as we have many new players, as we had to get new bodies in, as we had low numbers left after some players choose to leave and so on, and of course the loan players that we had went back to their parent clubs.”

“We’ve had one game there already against Cambridge and a couple of training sessions at Priestfield as well. So hopefully by the time we can deal with Southend and Crawley then we’ll be as familiar as anyone can be in a short space of time.”

The Gills have in the past few weeks made some very exciting signings – something that the boss agreed with, but with an air of caution when he said, “They’re good one hundred percent on paper, but I’ve never known a piece of paper to win a football match!”

The Gills boss went on, “they’re working incredibly hard. I think I said to supporters at the end of last season that we would be younger this year – we have to find a point of the difference; forgetting this salary capping business which isn’t really in place and is an aspiration that in time will be great for football but is not there yet!”

“So we’re still in David and Goliath situations many weeks – so we have to find a point of difference and our point of difference is going to be young exciting talented footballers who are very agile, very fit and want to come and make good impressions to everyone at Gillingham Football Club from the supporters, staff, everyone and of course to their parent club.”

Evans then said, “I want us, in a competitive game, to look as if we can work to the training plan that we’ve put in place for the week to deal with Southend.”

“I’m also looking really interestingly as to how some of the younger group step up and play against men – and it’s not boys, it’s men – when it really matters. And as we know Southend have kept the majority of their group of players – we beat them 1-0 just before COVID shut us all down, but equally we got outplayed for long parts that night so it’s going to be competitive.”

“From my point of view, we’ll come through injury free, lot more people get minutes in their tank and we’ll move onto Tuesday with the same aspiration and hopefully we’ll move into Hull with two wins from two games!”

The Gills boss confirmed that the still unsigned Brandon Hanlan won’t be a part of the Southend squad, but apart from that, the new look squad should be at full strength with many possibly making their competitive debut for the club.