Gareth Ainsworth admits Gillingham at ‘rock bottom’ after another heavy defeat

Gillingham boss Gareth Ainsworth feels his side are at “rock bottom” after conceding five goals for the second game inside a week.

Days after losing 5-1 at home to MK Dons, the Gills were hammered 5-0 at a Cambridge side who are now inside the automatic promotion places by four points.

The tone was set for the afternoon with a Dom Ball goal in only the second minute, with Cambridge missing a handful of chances before adding three further goals in under 20 minutes either side of half time ahead of Shayne Lavery’s superb late fifth.

“The performance, especially up to when I was able to make the changes, was not good enough by any means. Terrible,” Ainsworth said.

“The injuries is one thing but you’ve got to stand up to set pieces, you’ve got to fight, got to scrap. There’s some players in there that came in after me and I’ve got to take responsibility.

“The injuries coming back was the bright spark. As was Harry Waldock, who I thought had a cracking game. He didn’t deserve to be in a 5-0 defeat and he’ll have a career, but on today’s performance not everyone will.

“We have to defend better, we have to be stronger, we have to be more robust. We’re in a pretty poor situation at the moment. I’m saying to the boys we’ve got to find a way. We’re at rock bottom here.

“The clarity is that these injuries are coming back. I know exactly what I want to do. I just don’t think some players are good enough and I’ve got to make changes there.”

Neil Harris felt his Cambridge side were rewarded following an excellent week of preparation.

“I talked about mentality leading up to the game last week against Accrington. It wasn’t the standards that I set,” Harris said. “The bar’s very, very high, and they’ve adhered to that for a long period of time. I had my gripes afterwards. We have to be ruthless at this stage of the season.

“The lads took it on the chin. Training last week was immense and we’ve just performed like that. Was that a coincidence? Possibly. Were Gillingham not at it? Possibly. But you have to put teams to bed and today we were ruthless. That’s what the scoreline should have been last week and it wasn’t.

“Today we’ve done it because the sessions we repeated from the week before were on another level to what they were the week before. That’s the message to the players; there’s your standards again, do not dip below them.

“Today the body language, the mentality in the changing room, was brilliant.”