Gillingham 0 Cheltenham Town 0

Match 50/07/667 - Saturday, 2nd February 2008 - League One

Gillingham (0) 0
Cheltenham Town (0) 0
Att. 4,993

Entrance: Season Ticket
Programme: £3
Mileage: 46/4,126

Match Report

I’ve often said that when you buy a ticket to watch a football match, there have been no reviews and nobody has seen the match before to offer a recommendation. So every now and then something splendid might come along and catch the punter by surprise and sometimes you are served up a complete plateful of dross, unfortunately today was the latter.

This was a lousy game, a lousy result and the attendance figure shows that a lot of people did know in advance exactly what was going to be served up.

The end of the transfer window had brought a new, young striker from Rushden and Diamonds, Simeon Jackson. He looked lively, had a couple of decent strikes on goal, but naturally looked to be trying a little to hard on his debut. He also had to live off scraps and he will quickly realise that goals are going to be harder come-by a couple of levels higher and this is going to be made more difficult when the service was as poor as it was today.

Two others, Barry Fuller and Stuart Lewis made their home debuts, which meant that five of the starting eleven were playing non-league football a couple of months ago, two more came off the bench and Adam Bygrave can be added having come from reserve team football. That is an awful amount of inexperience. Too much, too soon? We’ll have to wait and see, the seeds are now sown.

A crossbar hit for either side was the closest we got to seeing a goal and in truth Cheltenham were equally as bad as Gillingham. The end should have been greeted by cheers as it brought to a finish a thoroughly unsatisfying 90 minutes. Of course it was boos that rang round Priestfield as supporters naturally vented their frustration. It can be argued that helps nobody, but the reaction is natural enough when the fare has been as poor as it was today. Let’s face it, if the reviewer said in advance that the film or the opera you were going to watch was a load of rubbish, you wouldn’t turn up at all.