Gillingham players get a welcome breather today after a full-on return to training.

Manager Mark Bonner admitted his players were feeling it on Saturday in their first pre-season outing after two intense weeks of work.

The Gills were in action against Championship Millwall and played out a goalless draw, with 22 players in action, all getting 45 minutes.

There’s another Championship side heading to Priestfield this Saturday when Watford pay a visit but Bonner says the workload won’t have been so intense this time around.

“The boys were knackered after 45 minutes,” admitted the manager.

“That’s fine, no problem and as a team emerges and it starts to come together, you will start to see partnerships over the next six weeks, and from the start of the season we’ll look like a good team.

“Fair play to them, we’ve done all sorts of things with them to try and get people close together and embed our principles and our values and ways of doing things but they have gassed it, they were spent, but that is good.

“You can’t get this time back when the games start and the real competitions starts, this key time of the year is massive for us and I am really pleased with the way they have approached that and they have to keep grinding it out.

“They have been good as gold so far and you would expect that in the early stages of this, nobody has been dropped yet, we haven’t had a proper game yet, but they are working their socks off and I can’t ask for much more from them at this point.”

The players were training six days a week for the first fortnight, with only Sundays off. They were due to play an in-house game on Tuesday (yesterday).

Looking ahead to the rest of the week, Bonner outlined the plans, saying: “On Thursday/Friday we will push them again.

“We are trying to balance out the work between with and without the ball and they probably need a week of lots of football and not so much of me throwing information at them.

“They have had bucket loads of it over the last two weeks, we need to try and consolidate work rather than keep adding things on.

“I have been really happy with the way the new lads have settled in and how everyone has come together around the ideas we have put across so far.”