Boss Mark Bonner has offered a positive injury update as his Gillingham squad nears full strength.
Midfielder Bradley Dack remains out as the summer signing’s second spell at the club continues to be an injury-hit one.
But versatile defender Robbie McKenzie, midfielder George Lapslie, winger Aaron Rowe and striker Elliott Nevitt have trained this week after a fixture-free Saturday and are in contention for this weekend’s home League 2 match against Harrogate.
Bonner, whose troops return to action after an 11-day break before not playing again until their clash with Bromley on Wednesday, December 4, said: “Some have been out for longer than others, some have a little bit more behind them, and they’re different types of injuries and different types of players.
“Also, what other options we have got in the squad will all be in my thought process, really, around ‘Are they fit to train?’. And ‘Are they fit to play?’. If they’re fit to play, ‘How much can they play?’. All those considerations are in my head, really.
“What we wouldn’t want to do is chuck someone in a little bit early and then bear the cost of that. If we can try to avoid that, that’ll be great.
“What we have after this game is another good block before the next one, before the games pick up.
“Maybe for one or two of those – as much as they will want to be involved now – I might put the reins on it a little bit and just keep hold of them to put a bit more training in. Maybe the type of injuries that they have had will determine it a little bit.
“If you have been out for six, seven or eight weeks and train for two or three days with the team, that’s not a lot, really, so we have to be a bit mindful of that.
“But some of them will definitely come back in. Some that have been in the squad will miss out, but we’ll shape up on that and decide.
“We’ll go from there.”
Dack, 31 next month, had been due to step up his injury recovery at St George’s Park this month.
But Bonner revealed: “It was actually at Loughborough because England were on an international break.
“That meant a late change of venue but Loughborough University is pretty good! So, that’s been good. He had a good week there.
“He has come back and been on the grass a little bit this week. But we’re just managing that and we don’t really have a timeline on that at the moment.
“We’ll just keep monitoring over the next few weeks and, hopefully, the next few weeks will give him a chance to get a few training sessions in and start to build-up as we get towards that busy (festive) spell.”
The Gills’ last meeting with Harrogate was memorable – for largely the wrong reasons – as they let a 1-0 advantage slip and ended up losing 5-1 in early April.
While Bonner himself has memories of a crazy night in North Yorkshire during Cambridge’s promotion-winning League 2 season in 2020/21, he has downplayed any psychological baggage any of Gillingham’s players will have from that defeat.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think the team is going to be so different and it’s such a different era.
“Del [goalkeeping coach Deren Ibrahim] actually told me that story on Thursday morning, it was the first time I’d heard it but I’d not heard a whisper of that at all. I don’t think players carry things like that, really, not too often, especially when games are that random.
“I have my own story of a game at Harrogate when we were chasing promotion and needed a point to get promoted. We hardly ever conceded a goal at Cambridge – and we lost the game 5-4 – it was the maddest game ever! It must be something about Harrogate away.
“But we’re taking them on here and we have got to try to get to our best levels. I don’t foresee there being anything in players’ heads around that.
“Sometimes, people talk about, over the past 20 years, you have only beaten this team a certain amount of times and that they’re a bit of a bogey team. Just talking like that just creates the problems.
“When you genuinely think about it, what on earth has one game now got to do with one 10 years ago or whatever?! It’s completely different.
“Just play the game in front of you and do everything you can to be on the winning team.”
