One of the Gillingham heroes from Saturday’s FA Cup win over Cardiff City Callum Reilly has been talking to KSN ahead of this weekend’s League One trip to Burton Albion.
Reilly, who was agonisingly close to doubling the Gills advantage late on when his deflected shot came back off the bar, reflected on a great afternoon for the club. “Its been a rollercoaster period from Christmas until last weekend which has ended on a big high which I think everyone at the club has needed. It was brilliant – we were confident going into the game on home soil that we could give them a good game and that’s what we ended up doing getting into the next round. It was great coverage and exposure for the club and hopefully that will continue in the next round – we know that its going to be a very tough game that may have been different if we’d have been here at Priestfield but I still think we’ve got a chance and we’ll go there with confidence after obviously beating Cardiff and getting good results in the League between then and now.”
“I hope the fans that came to the Cardiff game enjoyed it as much as we all enjoyed playing in it – they were superb and let’s hope that in the coming weeks we give them enough to keep the atmosphere that we had last weekend for our League games, keeping the support and momentum going. But the fans were something else second half against Cardiff as they kept us going second half and they galvanised us into getting the goal and helping us to hold on – the injury seemed as though it went on forever – but we needed every little but of help we could get from everyone to get us through and they were brilliant.”
Reilly who spent a short 16 game spell at Burton in 2017 and has had first-hand experience of Nigel Clough’s managerial style, and the Gills midfielder had nothing but praise for the Burton boss. “He knows how he wants his players to play,” Reilly told us; “I know a couple of the players and I know that they play in a positive manner and he gets them playing good football and they’re always be tough to beat at the Pirelli – it’s a very tight pitch tight ground – so we’ve got to go there knowing that we’re going to have to dig deep play our own game holding the ball like we did in the second half against Cardiff which is something that hopefully we can take into performances going forward.”
“I know a lot of the people at Burton and they will be focused on Saturday especially after what did happen to them in midweek. The occasion really was getting to the Semi Final in the end and they did tremendous to get there with some magnificent results to get to the Semi Final itself. It will be very tough regardless – we won’t be reading anything into the result on Wednesday we’ve got to take them on the back of the last League game they played and that was a 4-0 win at Rochdale, so we’ll be taking them off that game and we’ll be ready for a battle up there.”
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