Gillingham boss Steve Evans has been reflecting on the selection problems he is already facing within his small squad as The Gills prepare to face Blackpool at Priestfield on Saturday potentially missing three central midfielders.

Speaking at his weekly briefing on Friday morning, the Gills boss admitted, “I just think that we’ve been dealt an unlucky part of the dice and I think over the season it’s very unusual not to get that part of it so we’ve probably got it earlier than most and that’s the ramifications of not having the budgets of others.”

“We’ve got youngsters stepping up and performing with real credit – we go to Stoke; it’s probably one of if not the top budget in the Championship and they can make eight or nine changes and bring in top Championship players!”

“We’re working extremely hard on organisational work on the training ground and it is telling off, but we signed players to make a difference.”

“We kept O’Keefe, we signed Dempsey, we signed Willock all to make a difference and we’re robbed of that making it difficult for us when we lost three in the same position.”

“But we’ve got other good players in the building who can play there as well and can slot into different roles – we’re fortunate that we’ve signed a squad with flexibility in mind because it is a small squad, but we probably didn’t expect to be hit where we’ve been hit but we’ll accept it, go forward and try to win the game!”

He did go onto to say that he was still looking to strengthen his squad, but added, “It’s got to be about value for money now. I think that you see those with the big resources – the Sunderland’s, the Ipswich’s, the Peterborough’s – they’ll still be able to go to the market if they have to. If you’re Darren Ferguson sitting today or Phil Parkinson and have three central midfield players down, you’ll probably get two on the way in.”

“We don’t have the resources to do that, but what we will do is and I’m sure that the Chairman will be receptive to players joining us to be negotiated by myself principally with their parent club to get them at the right level.”

“It’s not about bodies – we’ve got seventeen of them – you only need eleven to start a game and we proved that at Stoke even though we only had five subs and no goalkeeper, but we want to be better than that.”

“You can see what we do with young players that may be in and out of the side, but we play a lot of football with them and they’ll be nurtured and further educated in the game that we have to play – it’s not all about the Premier League or the Championship as there’s levels below that that you have to be very good at.”

“And they’ve taken it on board very well at Wigan last week and at Stoke in midweek we were in a Cup-tie for ninety minutes against lads who… let’s just say that the car park was frightening especially when you look at our car park on a normal day.”

“That’s just reflective of what people earn, but we acquitted ourselves very well. It was similar at Wigan – we worked hard and got a positive result and that’s the objective against Blackpool against a team that have spent a lot of money and continues to do so.”

“That just makes good players against you, but it doesn’t mean that we cannot beat them because we can!”

Focusing on the players he does have available for the weekend game at an again empty Priestfield, the Gills spoke first about his latest addition to the squad – striker Dominic Samuel.

Evans told us, “It’s just good to have another player available, as the reality is that we won’t fill the bench at the weekend – we’re very limited in numbers as people can see – I’ve always admired Dominic as a player against my teams and respected the troubles he’s given us.”

“He’s been here this week for an extra couple of days training and we’ll see how sharp he looks again for the weekend.”

“Jack (Bonham) will have a check on Friday, and we’ll see how that goes, Josh Eccles will obviously come back into the group after being cup-tied at Stoke, but we lose Matty Willock, so once again we’re behind in numbers.”

“You really don’t expect to lose Matty Willock, Stuart O’Keefe and Kyle Dempsey all in the space of two weeks – three central midfield players, so we feel that we haven’t had a fair crack at it yet, so we’ll pick the seventeen that we’ve got and from that we’ll pick an eleven and we’ll work very hard!”

“Matty felt his hamstring tighten up at Stoke and he’ll have a scan which will ascertain whether it’s a week or five to six!”