Following Paul Scally’s letter to shareholders that was published last week, Gillingham boss Steve Lovell has issued his own rallying call to the Priestfield faithful.
With his side set to host the League Leaders, a promotion chaser and then a Premier League struggler in the Emirates FA Cup Third Round on January 5th – and not forgetting two away local derbies as well to close and open 2018 and 2019.
Reflecting on his term in the hot seat, Lovell told KSN, “We’ve had time – I’ve been in charge for fourteen months and that’s a long time in management these days – and I’ve continued to do the work that we started when I first came in.”
“We got a few players in during the summer which we wanted to improve on last year, which I think we have done and now it’s just a continuation of that and it’s working together with these players so that they understand what we want to achieve and what everyone at this football club wants to achieve.”
“And I’ve always said that we’ve got a great bunch of players – they work very, very hard. They want to learn; they want to get better and the last four or five weeks is the proof of that.”
“And not only that from the first game of the season when we beat Accrington and then Burton here at Priestfield. I think it’s about four or five changes to the team from that time, so it just shows that when everyone is fit, is a good squad and one that can push on.”
“I feel that we play the same way home or away – I think that the difference is the way teams come here and play a different way to what they do on their home ground and they do stop us from playing the way that we want to play, so I think that the mood of supporters – and this is genuinely across the country – are always dictated to by goals or if you’re in front or if you go behind, and it’s a natural reaction.”
“So if you go behind in a game, the fans obviously aren’t going to be happy with that, so they’re quite entitled to have a moan but not in a negative way. We are here, and I think that’s what the Chairman was trying to say, we are all here to push in the right direction and we need everybody to support us all the time through it, and you are going to lose games at home but that doesn’t mean that we’re a rubbish side.”
“When we win games everybody is happy, as when you win games it’s a natural reaction, but when you lose games is when you need most support – when you go behind is when you need the most support. We support the players as staff, so I think that the supporters should – to have a go at players and to have a go at the football club in general is not helping anybody.”
“We don’t; I don’t – I’m not a negative person at all; I’m always positive, always positive even when things are going wrong or you can take the positives out of it. At Hartlepool and two nil down, if I’d gone in the dressing room negative, we would not have won that game.”
“It’s the same thing from supporters – they’ve got to be a little bit patient, they’ve got to see what we are trying to do and what we want to do. And we’re all doing it the same – myself, Patto (Mark Patterson), Coxie (Ian Cox), the Chairman, we all want the same thing – we all want success as do the supporters and we’ve all got to be together as one – just like we were on Saturday when I thought the support we got from all round the ground was superb – and if we are, we’ve got a chance!”