Latest / Blood, Sweat & Gills / Voice Notes: Gillingham 0-3 Walsall
Transcript
- Simon Head: Welcome to Joe 365 voice notes. Please leave your message after the tone. Here we are then first match day of the new season. Optimism is always at his highest. The sun is shining. The pitch is going to look like a snooker table and I'm hopeful. I'm not saying we're to go out there and blow the doors off of Walsall on day one, but I do feel like we've been upgraded in. a lot of key areas of the pitch. Now it's going to take a little while for this team to gel. I wrote about it on the site this week. I think it is going to take a little while for this team to gel, but what I'm looking for is the attitude of the team, the general approach of the team, and just the way we go about our business out there on the pitch. can forgive people being a little bit caught out of position and maybe some relationships not quite being fully match sharp yet. because we've got brand new team, players are still getting to know each other, we've got players who are probably going to be making their first, possibly their first league appearance of their careers. I think patience is the word of the day. I think we need to just go out there and see, just exactly what we've got. A lot of teams in this league pack their teams with, with experience. We've got some of that. We've got some of that in the squad. ⁓ but we've also got a lot of youth and energy that we've brought in this summer, which is very encouraging. Plus we've got a load of really ⁓ talented young players coming through the system. So I think over time, we might not see the instant bounce that we're, you know, a lot of us are probably hoping for. It's going to take a little bit of time. think performance over result at this stage. Let's see, let's see some performances and fingers crossed if we keep getting the performances, we'll start to get the results. So that's what I'm looking for today as we head to Priestfield to take on Walsall. Let's have a good performance. Let's start the season with a positive performance, regardless of the final score. Josie Walsall, let's see how it goes. Big season for us, I think. A couple of years of real disappointment. Dreadful end to last season. Lots of pressure on Ainsworth to deliver. Got this two-year plan, whatever that means. Big player churn. It'll take a lot of time for those players to bed in. Patience is needed from the fan base. Will it be given? I'm not too sure it will do. There's a lot of sceptics out there towards Ainsworth. I wish him luck. But it's a results business, isn't it? And he needs to turn performances and results around. Hopefully starting today won't be easy. Walsall, bit like us last season, started well and fell away. Again, like us, lots of new players. Personally, I'd be more than happy with a 1-1. What we don't want to have happen is a repeat of last week. think there'd be even more pressure piled upon Ainsworth if it's 3-0 defeat or similar and another poor performance. fingers crossed and hopefully we kick off this new campaign with a win. The team news has just come out and it's great to see that Gordon has been given the captain seat for this season. That is the correct choice in my opinion. And it also puts a little bit of pressure off Little as well. And hopefully he can really grow into this kind of new look team and hopefully we see a new player from him this season as well. But I'm going for today against Walso who are going to bring a low down of praise of how we understand it. But I can just see this being a draw, unlike the one that we had to start last season against them at home. And I tell you what, let's get Goodwin to score the goal for Gillingham today. But I'm going for a one-all draw. Gilles has got the ball again in the centre of the park. Can he get this one through? It's Brophy! Surely takes the shot! ⁓ he's canning it against the crossbar! It's half time. It's 0-0. It's kind of good and bad isn't it really, we've been very encouraging on the hole. We've been getting forward very well, we've actually done a left hand side, had some good chances towards the end, hit the crossbar twice, Ronan Hale extending the goalkeeper from all of 30 yards. But we've had two big injuries to the team in that first half. Armani Little goes down after half an hour and then the real hammer blow Liam Gordon twisted his body in some sort of unnatural shape to clear the ball landed awkwardly and having to be helped off the field my worry is that could be a long-term injury for our captain I'm really really hopeful that he isn't as bad as it looks ⁓ he didn't need to be stretched off so I guess there's that but really really disappointed in seeing the skipper go off. He looked outstanding up to that point as well, an absolute crutch from a tackle after 20 minutes. So, bit of a mixed bag of a first half. We pretty encouraging though, I have to be honest. Especially down the left-hand side, Kadim Harris has looked very good. Brophy has looked very lively in the middle. And towards the end of that game we started to get Ronan Hale into the game a little bit more and that shot from him from 30 yards had the Walsall goalkeeper absolutely full stretch to tip it around the post. That would have been probably the goal of the weekend if that had hit the back of the net. But it's half time, it's now and our fingers crossed. We could turn that encouraging first half into a winning second half. We could take three points in this opening game of the season. But half time, 0-0. ...from the left-hand side on those long throws, can we make something happen here as Beckall gets it down, gonna be a shot towards Goffa, good wind! ⁓ he should be finding the target! ...taking short to change the angle, put into the box, can we get a flick on here, side towards Goal, surely this is the moment, good wind, takes a shot and he's cracked it against the crossbar! He's cracked it against the crossbar, but the crossbar I think three times this game now if it that... that we're here with Clark are going to deliver this ball into the box and try and pounce on this counter attack. That's a decent save but it could be in the back of the net and it is and Walsall do take the lead. It was a decent save in the first instance by Maynard Brewer over to Clark on the left hand side. It's coming into the box. He's going to take a shot isn't he? He is and it's all over the place. It's bounced and it's in the back of the net and Walsall have got their second and it is game over. It bounced all over the place. It was ping pong. It's the kind of luck that Gillingham haven't had this game. That's good work from Walsall, looking at the ball into the box, it goes in there and it's in the back of the net. And Walsall have got a third goal and they're away with this, not just with three points but with three goals. Just walking back to the ground now, not the opening day that you really want, it? Another 3-0 home defeat. Obviously the optics won't look good on that. I actually thought for the first 80-odd minutes, you know, we played well. Played like the home team on the front foot. creating chances, asking questions. But it's the old adage, if you don't take your chances. And that's what happened today. We created enough chances to have won the game. We didn't take them. Bad luck, hitting the woodwork. think the final scoreline flattered Walsall, if I'm perfectly honest. Why we know that, again, once we concede, we dig. I don't know, capitulate, is that the right word? Obviously the loss of Gordon I thought was immense in the first half and we can only hope that it's not serious ACL injury but it certainly didn't look good. We move on to Fleetwood. I think you've got to take the positives the first 80 minutes but you can't avoid the negatives, the remainder of the game and the Gordon injury but long hard season ahead. I'm torn between optimism and deep deep frustration. We were excellent for 80 minutes broadly speaking but it's the same old same old in many respects isn't it. We've not finished our chances. Good winds had some gill-edged chances there. It doesn't look great on debut has to be said and we've conceded a sloppy goal where we've switched off and we've then It's just, it's part of the course for us over the last few seasons. So the optimism is we played really well, better than we have for quite a long time. But then it's just reverted back to type. I fear for Ainsworth, to be honest, if we continue down this road for the next month or two, think his job's at risk already. So just some pre and post-match thoughts for myself. I actually haven't been to any pre-season games or the Luton game last week. So I was going in today with a... clear mind on these new signings, but as the sun goes, more things change and more they stay the same. As others have said, pretty solid and I'd say we were actually good for the first 80 minutes, bar with a little spell after the two injuries. We hit the bar a couple of times. The keeper's made three or four really good saves, think, from Hale in particular. Goodwin has missed two, one in particular, really good chance. But again, I said to Nick before the game, all I want from this season is a team that doesn't fall apart when we go behind. A team that shows some balls and some strength mentality, suppose. Be mentally strong, that's what it However, we then concede a sloppy goal and our ass is full out as always. We concede another one. And the third one is just the icing on the cake. I don't think we deserve that today, wasn't a 3-0 game. If we'd lost 1-0, we'd have gone, OK, we played well, but we don't take no chances. It's not a great start, but we move on. That's one those games where you just feel for like, for 80 minutes we were all on top of Walsall and it looked like we were the team that were going to walk away with the win. And it just felt like this is the new Gillingham team that's going to grow from this position and it was going to grow from this new culture that we've embedded. But then after we concede, it goes back to how we've experienced Gillingham the last half a decade, but we just kind of capitulate under pressure and just fall apart over the place. And that's exactly what happened. against his Walsall side today because we the woodwork three times and the goalkeeper made a couple of decent saves. Another day, we're the ones walking off a 3-0. But there's enough there for me to say that I still really think this team has a potential to really grow into something special, something good. But perversely, there's also a part of it that has... I'm kind of glad we lost and got thumbs. Get the loss out of the way because in other seasons we've won the first few games and look where we ended up 17th. Maybe... this season, we're going to reverse that, lose the first game and actually start to build from there. And who knows, might get further at the table. But this is a real tough one for us to swallow today. Where to start? Sat in me garden, trying to write notes for the matchday review. Thought we were super solid for 80 minutes, created loads of good chances. We forced their keeper into numerous good saves. Ronan Howe first half, right at the end. Ronan Howe at least twice, second half. Will Goodwin should do better with a left-footed effort that he dragged wide. He's really unlucky with the one that crashes against the bar. For all the world it looked like. At worst, we were going to sit there and talk about a 0-0 game and how we've kept a clean sheet and it gives us something to build on. The positives would have been Gareth McLeary getting minutes, Cameron Anshley being back in a matchday squad. Yet within 14 minutes, we're sitting here questioning mentality, we're sitting here questioning desire when you go 1-0 down, and we're sitting here talking about a game that was never 3-0 but has ended up being an absolute thrashing. buffled. Well, finally home after Gillingham-Neal-Walsall 3 and that was just a real mishmash of a game. sort of look at different aspects of that football match and you get very different reactions from it. You look at the fact that we had a completely new-look team out there and the fact that actually did pretty well over the majority of the game. That's a positive, right? That's definitely a positive. The fact that they... They meshed together pretty well. They were dangerous at points going forward. Still hitting it a little bit too long too often for my liking. I'd like us to mix it up a little bit more because when we did, that's when we looked really dangerous when we sort of mixed it from going long to building it up through the midfield and particularly out wide through Khadim Heris, who I thought played very well before he came off. But yeah, I thought it was just one of those games where And it's, you know, it's become a cliche over the years, isn't it? You have to score when you're on top. And we were on top, particularly in the second half, I would say from sort of the 55 to 75 minute mark, we were just knocking on the door constantly. And we couldn't put the ball in the net, you know, whether we were taking too many touches in the penalty area or we were just wasting really good opportunities or we were just very unlucky. Defensively, we have issues and the fact that we've lost Liam Gordon is alarming in the extreme. mean, I'm gutted for the guy on a personal level. He's just come in, he's been named captain. I'm sure, you know, hopes were high that he was going to be a real talismanic figure for us. And it looks as if he's going to be out for a little while. I just hope it isn't too long, but we shall see. But without him in the team, we look rudderless back there. We look all over the place. Omar Beckles. He's very, very good or very competent when the ball is in the air and it's coming straight at him. ⁓ But once the ball's on the floor or he's being asked to turn, that's when it gets a bit tricky and he's prone to some errors. Gets caught off balance quite a lot, I noticed as well. But we don't have that stability in the middle of the pitch. Shouts to Logan Dobs, who I thought was our best defender in the second half. thought he was outstanding. But yeah. I mean, my overriding emotion at the moment is that I'm going to try and take the positives from this because there were lots, but we also know that the same old problems need fixing and that is we just do not do the fundamentals in defense. That's basically it. We need another defender in there who will drive standards up and will do the fundamentals and get the people around him to do the fundamentals because you can't play league football defending. the way we have defended over the last three seasons and the way we defended in the last 10 minutes. So that needs fixing. The goals will come. We're creating chances. My issue would be if we weren't creating chances, but we're creating chances. So the goals will come. It's early, cause it's only day one of the season. So there's time to make some changes, turn things around. The transfer window is still open. I think we need two defenders, not one. We need two defenders and we can do with another striker. So I think we need to make those changes, get those bodies in the building and let's make a real go at this. But yeah, disappointing day at the office. I appreciate first day of the season. Fingers crossed we don't have too many more like that as the season progresses, but this is going to be a slow burn. This is going to take time. And I'd like to think that we're going to grow into the season and finish the year way better than we started it. Fingers crossed.