Gillingham 0 Millwall 1

Match 04/11/891 - Saturday, 23 July 2011 - Pre-Season Friendly

Gillingham (0) 0
Millwall (0) 1 McQuoid 90
Att. Estimated 2,500

Entrance: £15
Programme: £2.00
Mileage: 45/153

Match Report

Gillingham’s first of three friendlies at Priestfield will be my only pre-season visit as I embark on my annual rant about the admission fee. £15, plus another quid for booking on the internet, is too much for a bloody friendly and I don’t care whether it’s Millwall or Barcelona. OK, so I would happily stump up £15 to watch Lionel Messi strut his stuff on our fields of green, but Darius Henderson . . . do me a favour.

As it turned out it was a passable game of football, Gillingham lost to a last minute goal but gave a display that would lend itself to a certain amount of optimism for the coming season but with the caveat that they were rather toothless failing to force Steve Mildenhall in the Lions goal into a single save of note. The loss of Adam Birchall, whose cruciate injury sustained at Welling will sideline him for the first six months, leaves Danny Kedwell without an obvious partner and sadly it showed.

At times it was quite feisty for pre-season, the aforementioned Henderson and our own Matt Lawrence and Charlie Lee, both ex-Lions, being charitably ticked off by the referee when in regular season a card would certainly have been brandished.

The usual plethora of substitutions at half time contributed to the first two real chances of the game early in the second half both wasted by Millwall’s Hamer Bouazza and Josh McQuoid.

The deadlock was finally broken in the visitors’ favour in the last minute. Gillingham’s central defence weakened by the withdrawal of Lawrence went absent as a free kick from Bouazza found John Marquis in space in the six yard box, to glance a header past the triallist Argentinean keeper, Paulo Gazzaniga.

Gillingham can take positives from the first half performance of new captain Andy Frampton, resolute and very vocal, there is no doubt he will be a fine signing and also the little cameo from Luke Rooney, quiet first half but had a good 15 minutes before being substituted in the second. One suspects Rooney is not the long-term answer as a replacement for Birchall, but could be the immediate solution.