Manager John Coleman won’t be looking at the form guide for a clue as to how Saturday’s game will go.
The Gills hit the reset button after last Saturday’s loss at Barrow and Coleman got the response he wanted, with a point at league leaders Walsall on Tuesday night and a performance to match.
Crewe are well placed for a promotion challenge again this season – they were play-off final losers last term – but have lost both of their last two games by a 3-0 scoreline and are without a win in five.
There are heightened expectations in the Gills again but Coleman warned: “I want people to believe in us but it won’t happen just by turning up, that’s for sure.
“Crewe aren’t going to roll over, I can guarantee you that. They’ve got a great chance of getting promoted.
“If anyone thinks Crewe’s on a bad run, we’ve just turned the corner on Tuesday, so we’re going to win. If any of the players are thinking that, they’d better stop thinking it very, very quickly.
“Form and results don’t always tell a story.
“I’ve seen some of their game on Tuesday night, and it’s quite unfortunate really the way that game panned out for them and as their manager has acknowledged, they played well but you don’t always get what you deserve.
“If the decisions that we should have had this week would have gone our way, we could have been coming away with two away wins and from nothing out of the ordinary, nailed on decisions that could have led to penalties and sending offs, and that’s the fine lines in football.
“You can sometimes get misled by what is determined as form. Results don’t necessarily relate to form.
“It’s going to take a lot of hard work, as it does to win any game of football.
“We’ve got to build on what we did on Tuesday, not just say: ‘Well, that’s it, we’ve got to that stage now. That’ll suffice for a couple of weeks’. No, it won’t.
“We’ve got to get better and better and better. Hopefully we will but there’s no guarantees about that.”
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League 2 table
There’s been a lot of talk about what Gillingham’s identity should be going forward and what Coleman saw in the team on Tuesday was more like it.
The Gills were fired up, showed fight, worked hard and took the game to the leaders, chasing a win in the closing stages.
Coleman said: “That’s been the norm for mine and Jimmy’s teams over the years. That’s the minimum that we get. That has to be Gillingham’s identity.
“When I first came in, I spoke about the similarities between dockside places like Liverpool and Gillingham and having the same sort of personalities and fight and a desire to put your head above the water and live a little.
“Sometimes that big escape is a football match. From where we’re from, that’s what you demand, that’s what you expect. I’m sure people in Gillingham are exactly the same. I want to deliver that, and I want that to become the norm.
“Whilst I’m made up that people are praising us for that, I don’t want to be praised. I want that to be the acceptable norm.”
