Gillingham 0 Shrewsbury Town 1

Match 14/11/901 - Saturday, 3 September 2011 - League Two

Gillingham (0) 0
Shrewsbury Town (0) 1 Wroe (pen) 90+4
Att. 4,869

Entrance: Season Ticket
Programme: £3.00
Mileage: 45/943

Match Report

At 11 p.m. on Wednesday, Jim White stopped shouting and the transfer window slammed shut for another four months. I’m convinced that Sky Sports invented this arbitrary day to enable them to manufacture the situation that took Mikel Arteta to the Emirates and Raul Miereles to Chelsea with seconds to spare. Once Gillingham’s cheeky bid to bring Lionel Messi to Priestfield had collapsed, following a failure to agree personal terms, the whole evening bore no relevance to our club and very little relevance to clubs of our level.

The transfer window does no favours to the lower division clubs. It negates their capacity to trade when their financial health dictate and when the window is open then the buying clubs are usually looking for a quick fix that a signing from the fourth division is unlikely to supply. Gillingham supporters would have been looking at who was going where and hoping that perhaps a certain player went nowhere and would be available to the loan market in a week’s time. Unfortunately, Coventry City quashed these hopes.

So it was that Gillingham entered today’s fixture against Shrewsbury Town, with Danny Kedwell continuing to plough a lone furrow at the sharp end of the attack, aiming to put last week’s first defeat of the season at Rotherham behind them. Luke Rooney and Danny Jackman were recalled to the side at the expense of Danny Spiller and Joe Martin.

On a hot afternoon the game boiled down to two penalties. Kedwell had his first half spot kick saved by Ben Smith whilst Nicky Wroe twice converted his injury time winning penalty.

Ross Flitney made several fine saves during the game, the first of which came on 20 minutes when he dived to his right and pushed to ball away but only into the path of one-time Gills target Marvin Morgan, who blazed his shot over the bar from six yards from an unchallenged position. Shortly afterwards Rooney, who had a bright opening period, was brought down in the box to give Kedwell the opportunity to fire the home side in front from the spot. But his shot was too close to the keeper who got down to comfortably save.

Into the second half and Shrewsbury started asking the majority of the questions. Chances kept falling Morgan’s way and he continued to miss them, albeit in the back of another decent Flitney save. It was well into stoppage time when Terry Gornell sent Sean McAllister through and into the box; Flitney raced from his line but was beaten to the ball and sent the midfielder sprawling to the ground leaving the referee little choice but to award the penalty. Nicky Wroe was asked to take the spot kick a second time following encroachment for the first, but each time he drove the ball firmly to Flitney’s right and into the net in front of a despondent Rainham End.

So the loan window opens on Wednesday, Jim White will not be shouting and, to be fair, the vast majority of the dealings done in the lower Divisions won’t be worth shouting about. The majority inside Priestfield on Saturday will know that just one line on the ticker at the bottom on the screen will say all that is needed.