Millwall (1) 2 Gregory 12 Onyedinma 63
Gillingham (0) 1 Dack 75
Attendance: 10,821
Entrance: £10 Senior (Second hand ticket!)
Programme: £3.00
Mileage: 96/5,188
Match Report
Gillingham’s form of late has been reasonable but as a watch they have been turgid, to use a friend’s word. So did I really want to travel to Bermondsey on a day when a train strike made driving almost compulsory. Any other time of the season, I might have looked around for another game but having been cooped up over the Christmas period, it seemed like a reasonable choice, one that became all the more reasonable when a bloke picked me out of the queue for a ticket and offered me a £17 senior ticket for a tenner!
It was a cold, foggy evening making the dank surroundings of The New Den even less inviting than they usually are. A good knowledge of the area made a parking space quite easy to find leaving just a ten minute walk to the ground.
An uneventful opening ten minutes ended with Millwall opening the scoring after 13 minutes. An effort was cleared from the line but when the ball was recycled by Shaun Cummings, his loft into the box was headed into the path of Lee Gregory who had the relatively easy task of tucking it past Stuart Nelson.
Millwall, for a period, held the ascendancy and had a goal ruled out for offside when Gregory netted after being put through by Ben Thompson.
Gillingham wrestled control of the game back midway through the half, although their efforts on goal were limited to a comfortable save from Jordan Archer and a header from Jay Emanuel-Thomas that narrowly cleared the bar.
The opening quarter-hour of the second period was even before Millwall doubled their advantage after 63 minutes. Fred Onyedinma made a surging run into the penalty area without facing the most demanding of challenges; his initial shot was blocked by Nelson, but he reacted quickest to the rebound to hook the ball into the net.
The evening quickly went from bad to worse for the visitors as Paul Konchesky, booked after 58 minutes, brought down Onyedinma on the edge of the box to receive a second yellow leaving Gillingham a man light.
In adversity, Gillingham came to the party. Bradley Dack, who had been largely anonymous, suddenly looked the player we know he can be, despite picking up a stupid booking for dissent.
After 74 minutes Dack’s well struck shot from the edge of the box found the bottom corner and Gillingham were back in the game.
It made for an exciting finish as the Gills sought an equaliser putting the Lions under a good deal of pressure. However, hopes of retrieving something out of the game ended when Dack was sent off for a poor challenge on Thompson to reduce Gillingham to nine men.
And so to my post-game adventure. To put it into context, I had worked in the area for 20 years; been down most of the avenues and alleyways in search of an alternative route when the Old Kent Road was at a standstill, not an unusual occurrence.
Dack’s dismissal with barely two minutes remaining convinced me that an early exit was in order but this was stymied by the locked gates of the visitor’s end. However, on this occasion, the wait was short and I was quickly on my way. The easy route was along Zampa Road and down Surrey Canal Road, but I decided to follow the same route that I had taken on the way in. I quickly realised that somehow I wasn’t heading in the same direction that had brought me to the Den and the trouble with any visit to Millwall you don’t want to advertise the fact that you support the opposition by asking for directions.
As I reached a main road, I recognised several landmarks and knew exactly where I was but I had become so disorientated that I couldn’t work out how to get to where I wanted to be. Eventually plucking up courage to ask a couple of blokes who had just got off a bus, just to get back to Millwall, they didn’t have a clue.
Suddenly, a light came on and I reached for my mobile phone and google maps, why had it taken 20 minutes for that to dawn on me? Sure enough in less than 10 minutes I was back at the car and then drove into traffic on the Old Kent Road, some things never change!
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