Forty five minutes in to Saturday’s game at the Priestfield Stadium and the uninitiated could have been forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled across a pre-season friendly.

Despite the fact that the traditionally frosty Medway breeze made what has to be the division’s bleakest away end feel decidedly arctic, the blue sky, the warm(ish) sunshine and two sides that appeared to be operating under par could easily have fooled onlookers in to thinking it was late July rather than mid-April.

The highpoint of the Gills’ first half – and, as it transpired, their whole afternoon – came barely 180 seconds in when Billy Bingham found himself barely 10 yards out with the goal at his mercy. Bingham, playing his first game for almost two months, smacked the ball against the post.  That scare quickly woke up a Shrewsbury side playing five across the back with two holding midfielders and the visitors then had much the better of the next 20 minutes.  Still, by half-time any dynamism that Rangers loanee Greg Docherty and the ever-lively Shaun Whalley gave them had quietly petered out.

Both sides will have known that one more win would in all likelihood see them get out of the relegation quagmire that’s engulfed the bottom half of League One. The question was whether either team was up to the challenge of waking from their respective slumbers to get the deed done today.

Shrewsbury answered that question very much in the affirmative. Up until a month ago Shrewsbury were the worst travellers in the league with just the one solitary away win (at what was then a massively out of sorts Wimbledon) to their name.  Wins at Peterborough and at fellow strugglers Southend had seen Sam Ricketts’ team shake off their away blues, but neither of those wins ended in quite the canter that this one did.

Salop were certainly helped by the fact that in the second half Gillingham went from bang average to downright awful. Steve Lovell’s diamond formation left the Gills devoid of any real width, whilst the Shrewsbury wing-backs, James Bolton and Scott Golbourne, got ever more in to the game. Throw in the fact that the evergreen Anthony Grant got a grip of things in the centre of the park and Shrewsbury quickly started to take control.

Indeed, it was Bolton who took advantage of some smart build up play to stroke home his first league goal of the season. Any visiting supporters worrying that the goal might shake the hosts in to life need not have worried; Gillingham struggled to get the ball in to decent areas as Omar Beckles, Ro-Shaun Williams and the much-maligned Luke Waterfall dealt easily with anything and everything thrown at them. Not that, in truth, much was thrown at them at all.

Beckles and Williams, both pacy centre-halves (Williams has a sub-11 second 100m in his locker so there really won’t be too many who’ll be catching him) with an ability to play, certainly look like they will be part of Ricketts’ future plans. Waterfall also appears to be a totally different player to the gaffe-prone blunderbuss that Salop fans witnessed week in week out before Christmas. They aren’t quite Baresi, Maldini and Cannavaro, but they look like they could make Shrewsbury a tougher prospect to play against in 2019-20.

The game was effectively up for Gillingham when Tyrese Campbell tapped home to make it 2-0 on the hour mark.  Lovell did his best to shake things up for the Gills, bringing Elliot List, Josh Rees and Tahvon Campbell on but, quite frankly, the game could have lasted five hours and it’s unlikely they’d have managed a goal. That was epitomised when Rees’s late effort was inadvertently blocked by the Gills’ Brandon Hanlan on the goalline. It was that sort of day.

Both sides will feel they’ve done enough to stay up. 50 points (Shrewsbury) rarely sees sides get relegated from League One, whilst 48 points (Gillingham) is also likely to be (just) enough in this decidedly odd campaign. Both sides nonetheless wouldn’t mind one more three-pointer, just to make 100 per cent sure.

words Dan Hough, Shrewsbury Town fan