Gillingham manager Mark Bonner’s outlined what he expects against a visiting Accrington Stanley team who have just won their first game.
Stanley beat Morecambe 2-1 last weekend in a battle of the basement teams to climb off the foot of League 2. It was their first win in nine games.
With 19 goals conceded, no team has let in more, but they’ve only scored one less goal than the Gills. Bonner’s expecting an open affair at Priestfield.
The Gills boss said: “They’ve changed system in the last three or four games, including the cup game, from what they were earlier in the season.
“They managed to rest a lot of players on Tuesday night for the Trophy game (losing 2-1 at Tranmere), so we’ll expect it to be a team similar to the one that got the result last week against Morecambe, which was a big result for them, their first win.
“Having been in a similar situation in the past, where you’re doing okay but not getting results, that first result can be a big lift for your team.
“I expect that the game will take a similar shape to what a lot of their games have, which can be quite stretched, quite open, chances for both teams.
“They’re an aggressive team, statistically currently the most forward-passing, direct team in the league, the most aggressive, pressing team in the league as it stands after 10 games. It gives you an idea of what the game can look like, and they’re off the back of a positive result last week.
“I expect it to be an energetic game, a tough game, one that we’ll have to be good in the chaos, play football at the right times, but make sure that we’re physically aggressive and tidy the game up in the right moments. Win second balls, defend crosses properly, match people’s hard-running.
“It will be an interesting game, one that we have to be ready for but we’ve got our own motivation to get back on track after the last week to get a good result ourselves.”
Gillingham have registered blanks in their last two games in front of goal – something Bonner will be keen to see come to an end.
He said: “I think they’ll have moments where they are really compact defensively and a back five ends up low in the pitch and we have to be good enough to unlock that, and then there’ll definitely be loads of transition moments in the game because of the way they play. We’ll have to be good at all of it.
“In the previous week, in the two challenges that we’ve had against teams where we’ve had the ball, they’ve got on top of the game in the scoreline and we’ve had to unlock teams. We haven’t been good enough to do that.
“The answer isn’t to hope games are open so we can be good. The answer is be good at everything and find a way of winning every game. That’s what we’re working on and that development of a team will take the whole season.
“There’ll be good bits, bad bits and when you fix one thing, usually something else comes and causes you a problem because either you haven’t had a focus on that, you haven’t worked on that, or the opposition find something else to challenge you with. That’s the story of a season.
“Whatever the game looks like, I think there’ll be moments of all of it and our job is to find the solutions a bit tactically and positionally, but players have to bring the game to life in those moments and find a better technical level than we did last week to make the possession that we have and the chances that we have of higher quality.”
