Gillingham manager Mark Bonner is continuing to monitor the club’s January transfer options while dealing with a hectic playing schedule.
The Gills will be keen to shuffle the pack during the transfer window, with a view to add some more athleticism to the squad and balancing things up, but there will also need to be players leaving first to free up some room.
Bonner admits the transfer activity isn’t likely to happen straight away as plenty of things will need to come together.
“It’s not my sole focus,” said Bonner, whose team faces four games between now and their trip to Chesterfield on January 5.
“My sole focus is prepare the team, analyse the team, get ready for the next game and so on. That has to be the number one focus because if you take your eyes off the next three games you’re in trouble really.
“These two weeks are mental because the number of days we’re in watching, planning games and then you have that going on in the background.
“My absolute focus is on that but when everyone’s packed up and gone home I’ll be here watching players and meeting with everybody else like Andy Hessenthaler (head of recruitment) and (managing director) Joe (Comper) to try and really focus on maybe what can happen, what is happening, what news there is, what sounds like it’s going on.
“At the moment it’s just loads of conversation, loads of finding out who’s doing what and so on.
“I don’t think January will be crazy because it never really is, and you probably don’t want it to be, but I’m sure there’ll be a little bit of movement throughout the month and usually it gets busier as the month goes on.
“There’s certainly not anything to go on like the first day of Jan, but we’ll do what we can to try and balance the squad and make us stronger.
“We’re working really hard on that at the moment and I am very involved in the process amongst the other bits as well.”
Gillingham’s chance to make major changes will be in the summer with some top earners out of contract.
For January, it will be doing what they can, within a short space of time.
Bonner said: “I just think January’s harder compared to the summer because of the amount of time you have.
“We want to try and avoid signing players that have been injured and we want to try and avoid signing players that haven’t played, because history tells us that those two things might mean that that player gets injured, and we need players to try and come in and help us now.
“To try and get players that can come in and make you better and help you win now, well that’s really hard.
“There’s not that many that are actually available, or interested ,or fit what we want and can do it.
“We know that we need to manoeuvre players out in order to free them up because we’ve got too many players. It’s a really big balancing act.
“I know what I’d like to happen but it rarely works like that. So let’s just see how it plays out.
“Right now I don’t want people to think I’m not on that, because I am all over that, but at the same time we’ve got a monster game schedule and that is the most important thing at the minute.”
