An absolutely embarrassing second half performance

An absolutely embarrassing second half performance. First half, I was happy enough with how we kept the ball. If we kept playing like that in the second half, I'm confident we would have worn Gillingham down, got the first goal and gone on to comfortably win the game.

For some reason in the second half, we stopped passing, started panicking, went more direct and the game turned into an end to end lottery. Instead of using our superior players to get on the ball to break Gillingham down, we resorted to hit and hope, pumping aimless balls long up the park. Long balls against a team like Giillingham with all our supposed superior quality? Embarrassing!

Never thought I would say this with Warnock as our manager, but Gillingham wanted it more today. Morrison chose to stay down and complain instead of getting straight back up to defend their goal and Smithies dived the wrong way and let the ball fly into the middle of the net. It seemed Smithies guessed where the ball was going and guessed incorrectly. He would have had an easy save if he stayed in the middle of his goal.

There is no way anyone can defend that shambolic second half. It summed it up when Ralls had the ball with 20 yards of open space in front of him and what does he do? Instead of driving into the space, he takes the safe option in hitting a long, hopeful diagonal! That's the type of attacking play from limited League 1 standard players who Gillingham are used to defending against! Gillingham comfortably coped with our aimless long balls forward. We went from controlling possession and controlling the game in the first half to panicking and hitting aimless long balls in the second half.

Everyone involved must 100% take the blame today, from Warnock to all the players who let us down. Today, we got beaten by a very limited, inferior Gillingham side who just rolled up their sleeves and had a go. We had no pattern of play in the second half, we totally lost control of the game and allowed Gillingham to drag us down to their level. We offered very little to threaten, lacked composure, stopped playing to our strengths and we deservedly lost.

An absolutely embarrassing second half performance. First half, I was happy enough with how we kept the ball. If we kept playing like that in the second half, I'm confident we would have worn Gillingham down, got the first goal and gone on to comfortably win the game.

For some reason in the second half, we stopped passing, started panicking, went more direct and the game turned into an end to end lottery. Instead of using our superior players to get on the ball to break Gillingham down, we resorted to hit and hope, pumping aimless balls long up the park. Long balls against a team like Giillingham with all our supposed superior quality? Embarrassing!

Never thought I would say this with Warnock as our manager, but Gillingham wanted it more today. Morrison chose to stay down and complain instead of getting straight back up to defend their goal and Smithies dived the wrong way and let the ball fly into the middle of the net. It seemed Smithies guessed where the ball was going and guessed incorrectly. He would have had an easy save if he stayed in the middle of his goal.

There is no way anyone can defend that shambolic second half. It summed it up when Ralls had the ball with 20 yards of open space in front of him and what does he do? Instead of driving into the space, he takes the safe option in hitting a long, hopeful diagonal! That's the type of attacking play from limited League 1 standard players who Gillingham are used to defending against! Gillingham comfortably coped with our aimless long balls forward. We went from controlling possession and controlling the game in the first half to panicking and hitting aimless long balls in the second half.

Everyone involved must 100% take the blame today, from Warnock to all the players who let us down. Today, we got beaten by a very limited, inferior Gillingham side who just rolled up their sleeves and had a go. We had no pattern of play in the second half, we totally lost control of the game and allowed Gillingham to drag us down to their level. We offered very little to threaten, lacked composure, stopped playing to our strengths and we deservedly lost.

No one of them could even hit a barn door two feet in front of them on today's display

They also where not up to full strength they had players missing which makes it an even worse result