With Gillingham in the middle of a sixteen day “mini break” in their season, striker Josh Andrews and the rest of Gareth Ainsworth’s squad have had the chance to dust themselves down ahead of Newport County’s arrival at MEMS Priestfield next weekend.

The Gills haven’t played since New Years Day’s defeat at Swindon after their game with Notts County was frozen off last weekend, and with the weekend’s scheduled game with MK Dons postponed due to the Dons’ Emirates FA Cup commitments, the Gills squad has had time to reassess an opening half of the season that was mixed to say the least. 

“It certainly has been frustrating,” Andrews told us when we met this week. 

“Frustrating in that our performances overall have been quite good, but we haven’t got the points to show for that in recent games.”

“We probably outperformed Swindon last time out stats-wise and the feeling in the game was that we were playing better only to be left ruing missed chances!” 

“The two home games over Christmas were tough. The Cambridge game we conceded a soft goal early on but from that point we pretty much controlled most of the rest of the game – we have done that a lot this season where we have come back in games to rescue and claim points, but we certainly walked off the pitch on Boxing Day feeling as though we’d dropped two points even though we did come from behind!” 

“Colchester was a physical battle – the sort of game that I like,” Andrews continued grinning.

“A lot of games in this League are, but we came away from that game conceding what we thought was a really soft penalty late on and again we feel like we lost two points on a game that we largely had the better of the game.” 

“Drawing games can get so frustrating especially when we have drawn so many consecutive games like we have. I think that our performances at the start of the season were arguably worse than they have been recently, but we were winning games.”

“At the minute, it does feel as though we are not getting the run of the green; the chances aren’t falling for us and we just aren’t getting the breaks when we need them!” 

“After a lot of the games recently, we’ve gone into the dressing room wondering how we haven’t won – I know the fans think that too and are getting frustrated.”

“But credit to the boys as we have fought back and got ourselves back in games – Shrewsbury for the prime example of a game that got away from us and yet we showed real fight as we have done regularly this year.” 

“Football these days is all about squads and with so many games so quickly at Christmas, there has to be changes, and given that in the last year I have had a lot of struggles over the last year with injuries, if I did start games back to back to back and something happened where I was out for a length of time, I am sure that people would question the decision to play every game. It really is a lose-lose scenario!” 

“Not playing now until next week it really is a hard balance as whilst it is a good thing not to play after such a busy period, you do get a reset period mid-season where you can work on things within the squad and training, but when you’re looking for wins as we are, it is good to be playing games too!” 

“I think that the fans have seen the fight and the desire on the pitch with every player giving one hundred and ten percent – I don’t think that there has been one time this season where we have gone under or folded under any sort of pressure and every single game that we have played, especially here at Priestfield has gone to the wire with us fighting and scrapping for every single point and we will keep doing that hopefully for the rest of the season.”