Gillingham 1 Carlisle United 0: Paul Simpson appeared to talk to the media with the demeanour of a man who’d just been told the cat had eaten his winning scratchcard. For a few minutes, the man who has inspired so many good things about Carlisle United looked shocked, not to say lightly fuming.
Not beaten – that’s not Simpson. Already the Blues manager will be thinking of the way back. But in the moments after this sour, blustery defeat, it was as though Simmo had run all the events through a processor and found, to his alarm, absolutely nothing to be upbeat about.
Not since Harrogate Town last season, when a patched-up team lost abysmally, has he seemed so down on a performance. Simpson was not a million miles from saying the best features of this game were the half-time whistle and then its full-time sibling, and not a single thing else.
Such a view would have found little disagreement. This was as far from a promotion performance as Carlisle is from Gillingham. The only upside is if it proves a reason for sharp improvement, a prompt for clarity when none was visible here.
This was, we should remember, a first defeat in seven. That statistic in itself offers mitigation. United were a minute from retaining a top three place. These facts suggest the answers still very much lie within.
Yet after this non-showing, more of those answers now need to be brought forth. To questions such as: how has a side with so much apparent attacking variety now gone three games without scoring – and, in all truth, without looking much like it?
Why did they never look better than an upbeat, tooled-up but still, before 3pm, 19th Gillingham? Why couldn’t they get on the ball enough, penetrate enough, flex their promotion muscles enough?
Why couldn’t they be Carlisle United 2022/23, enough?
Simpson, through a series of post-match interviews with the club, BBC Radio Cumbria, Sky and the News & Star, was consistent with criticism in which he involved himself. “I’m raging with the performance from us, I’m disappointed with myself with some of the things I’ve done, and I know the players are disappointed, they’re saying it in there,” he said.
It now drops to the manager to figure out, for instance, why a three-pronged wide attack did not fire at all, why a midfield without the usual additional body failed to get hold of Gillingham, why things went too long, too often and too ordinarily – even why, in the final analysis, their normal resolve faded in the added-time moment when Shaun Williams found sudden space to send Priestfield ballistic.
To watch that moment was to witness a home club surging back from the brink. Having been wretched until Christmas, Gillingham are now the EFL’s form team. That, pretty much, was Carlisle last season. This time it has been substantially different, consistently better, for the Blues across the piece, and so the response to this result must be telling.
First, they have to sort the scoring issue out, in the small matter of another away game against Leyton Orient. No biggie. League Two’s leading scorers were impotent again here – a trident of Joe Garner, JK Gordon and Omari Patrick unable to click, never screaming goals or even whispering them.
Nor, in a vast sense, did Gillingham, but Neil Harris’s side have post-takeover momentum and a certain sharpness of elbow. This led to a first half of strong wind and weak creativity: all battle, clearance and challenge, and barely a single shot worth mentioning.
Other than a couple of early Gills corners, and a brace of late attempts by Alex MacDonald and Patrick, there was nothing worth writing down. Carlisle’s 3-4-3 got them next to nowhere, Patrick the only one seeing any sort of ball on the right but neither producing nor being supported by a great deal.
The hosts’ deployment of former Exeter promotion midfielder Tim Dieng parked a barrier between United’s own middle men and true creative zones, and there was no Alfie McCalmont or Jordan Gibson to engage the hosts in that advanced area. Garner toiled, as Garner does, but the Blues’ passing was imprecise, even their balls from the back failing to heed the strength of the wind.
Gillingham had broadly the better of a grinding half, and the same after the break. Tom Nichols swiped a shot over the bar, Williams rifled one across goal and line-leader Oli Hawkins almost fashioned a couple of things amid his jostling with Morgan Feeney.
These were not golden chances, for United’s last-ditch defending remained steady, and the Blues, after substitutions which involved the arrival of Gibson, then built deceptively better territory and one decent opening which saw MacDonald deny the arriving Ben Barclay.
There was a greater foothold, but not the wit or skill to sustain it. Owen Moxon’s deliveries and set-pieces posed token danger and even their best opening, for sub Kristian Dennis in the 80th minute, was finished with hope rather than certainty, and saved by Glenn Morris.
Gillingham then mounted the late finish which hindsight now cons you into thinking inevitable. There was the familiar figure of Tristan Abrahams introduced from the bench to chase anything that moved around his old club’s defence. There were free-kicks, chances for more pressure, balls to be dealt with.
There was a little spell of focused threat from another Gills sub in Dom Jefferies on the left. There was the ball Carlisle couldn’t smother, the arrival of Williams and a rifling finish whose celebrations might have been heard across all of Kent.
United had no time to reply. Eight games now says they do. The tone and quality of what they say will now define a season.
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