Gillingham manager Martin Allen has admitted goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga could be sold to a Premier League club this summer.

The 20 year old Argentinian has attracted a lot of attention after signing for the club last summer and had been linked with a move to Peterborough United last month.

That move seems unlikely now, but Allen did reveal to TalkSport that he felt the keeper could leave Priestfield this summer if the right offer came along:

“I had a chat with the Chairman about it and there is interest at the moment. Three Premier League clubs have registered an interest in him. He’s massive and I saw him yesterday for the first time. He looks like Peter Andre and has a fantastic smile .”

“I’ve only seen him running around the training ground, doing some core strengthening and conditioning exercises, but he is a big unit. Andy Hessenthaler speaks very highly of him, so does the Chairman and I’m a little confused really because Jack Butland at Birmingham City is supposed to be going for millions and he’s been playing at Cheltenham in Division Two, so why for Gazzaniga are we not looking at similar figures?”

“I think in all fairness, that’s how it will all be going.”

“He’s a fantastic keeper and it looks as though he’ll be going off to a Premier League team, so for a club like Gillingham it will be a big boost to get some money in and crack on.”

Allen was one of four candidates short listed for the Gillingham job and told TalkSport how he had been talking with Paul Scally for some weeks before being offered the job:

“I’ve had a few chats with the Chairman at Gillingham throughout the summer. He’s taken his time to make the appointment, Mr Scally, I’ve been over to see him a few times. I got a phone call on Tuesday night to say I start on Thursday, so that’s exactly what we did.”

“The Chairman just wanted to make a change, but I think he respects the good work that Andy has done, so he’s now moved into a Director of Football role, which is obviously new for Andy and it will be new for me, but so far we’ve had some positive communication about how we’re going to work together and develop a good working relationship for the best for the club for the future.”

Some fans have already suggested Allen and Andy Hessenthaler may find it difficult to work together, but Allen admitted that despite having never worked under a Director of Football, he thought it may well work out:

“I did speak to another club with a Director of Football and without a shadow of a doubt, I don’t think I’d have been able to work in that environment that he was suggesting, but here it’s quite clear I’m the manager, he’s in fact my boss, but he’ll let me make decisions and he’ll help me recruit the players, it’ll be the players that I want, he’ll let me recruit the staff , but there’s many other facets to a football club with sports science and with recruitment, analysis, finding players, getting players, speaking to agents, it can be quite draining to managers and Andy hopefully will be taking a lot of that responsibility away from me which is an absolute blessing.”

Allen has picked up a tag as a manager that doesn’t hang around at clubs for long, but the former Barnet boss is hoping to shake off that tag and stay at Gillingham for the long term:

“The average tenure at the moment is up to fourteen months with managers, so we go into it knowing the risks of the job that we all do. If you do well you’re the hero, if you don’t do so well or the results don’t go well, you’re the villain and supporters very quickly turn and ultimately you get the sack.”

“At Notts County the supporters were pretty happy I thought, from going from certainties for relegation, to a team just on the edge of the play-offs when I left, so that was very disapponting and I was expecting to stay there for a long time and I was very happy in Nottingham.”

“The little job I did at Barnet for three weeks at the end of the season, we won two of the three games, but supposedly I wasn’t up to the job of what the Director of Football wanted me to do, so he’s gone in a different direction, so you never know with football management, it can go any way.”

“It’s a very fine line. If you get good players, then you win football matches and to get good players in you need to unfortunately have to have the money.”

Being in the job for just a few days, Allen revealed he is looking at making changes at the club, but not looking at making wholesale changes:

“This one is the first time I’ve gone into a job where you’ve finished in eighth position, so it’s not massive changes that are needed, just a bit of tweaking, bring in a few players and build on it, improve it slightly in different areas, hopefully, and kicking it on.”

Part of being a new manager at Gillingham sees Allen bring in his own backroom staff with John Schofield appointed Assistant Manager, while Allen explained who James Russell is:

“At Notts County, I had an intern sports scientist alongside out first team physio and he was very, very good. He was top class and didn’t get paid for the whole year, he’s only 24, he’s never planned and plotted a pre-season, so I called him on Tuesday night, told him that he’d got the job of Head of Sports Science at Gillingham.”

“As a boy, he was brought up in Chatham, his dad was a season ticket holder and he used to go when he was a boy to support Gillingham, so he was absolutely over the moon as he only came out of university last year.”

“He’s so excited and he had Wednesday to try and put something together. I’ve taken a first team coach I had at Notts County with me called John Schofield. He’s a very good technical coach and between the pair of them they worked on it on Wednesday at home and then they met just outside Gillingham at six o’clock on Thursday morning.”

“John Schofield left his house in Lincoln at 3:30am to get there for that meeting, they thrashed it out for a couple of hours and then at three o’clock we started our first training session with the players. That’s how it’s worked so far.”

“I’ve had very little to put into it. I’ve left it to John Schofield and James Russell to put the whole thing together.”

Allen also went on to reveal that the club will be looking to use interns over this season to help with analysis of all aspects of the game.

Gillingham begin their 2012/13 campaign at home to Bradford City on Saturday 18th August and Allen admitted it would be a hard first few games for his new side:

“Bradford will be strong. Phil Parkinson did well at the end of last year to keep them up. He will bring in some good players , build up a good team spirit, organise them, so that’ll be a tough game.”

“Our first game is the Bristol City game away in the cup, so that will be great for us to play against a Championship team and it’s actually on my birthday.”

With every new manager comes the expectation that the club will make some new signings and Allen conceded he was looking at bringing in some fresh faces:

“We’ve drawn up lists over the weekend and had a meeting yesterday with the senior staff and Andy Hessenthaler. The four of us will be looking to put together lists of potential targets and then next week while we’re away in France, Andy, the Chairman and of course myself will be trying to bring those players in.”

“There are some fantastic youth players and Darren Hare has done a brilliant job in Gillingham. There’s Connor Essam whose only nineteen, he’s played a lot of games, we’ve had seventeen year olds playing in the first team, so bringing all these boys through is key and that’s the future of the club.”

Gills fans may wonder what style of football the club will play this coming season and Allen tried to explain his philosophy:

“We did it at Notts County last year, we played it out from the back tried to play total football, we had both of our centre backs pulling wide and had both of our full backs pushed up and we brought in a central midfield player called Gavin Mahon who was a very good, calm, composed, passer of the ball, playing in front of the back two.”

“Our formation was 4-1-3-2. We started off with a 4-3-3 with two wingers playing high and wide, but we didn’t get enough penetration and couldn’t get crosses into the box, so we changed it and played with two centre forwards and with the three behind them.”

“We still found it hard to penetrate, because both full backs have got to be fantastic athletes and really good at getting forward and then on the counter attack we were being left open and we worked on it all the way through pre-season, the players contributed to what we were doing and we went right throughout the season with that.”

“At times we got caught out, but it was good on the eye, the players took to it, the supporters, I think they liked it and that will be something we persevere with.”

Being in the job for just a couple of days, Allen is still getting to grips with the players at his disposal and went on to explain what his plans are for the rest of pre-season:

“We had them all in this morning. They came in for a World Cup competition, split them up into four teams of eight, England, Brazil, Germany and Syria which as fun.”

“England came bottom of the competition and the winners went away with mars bars, so all the lads got to play football and that’s what we all love doing at the end of the day.”

“The most important thing for me as a manager is to improve the starting eleven with player recruitment and let the coaches and the sports science department get on with the fitness and the training and then as we go through the next few weeks, I’ll be looking at how we want the team to be tactically wanting to play, organise the team and starting bedding that in with the players we’ve got and how we want them to play for that first game in the Capital One Cup.”