Gillingham chairman Paul Scally is delighted with Martin Allen's efforts this season. Picture: Barry Goodwin.

by Luke Cawdell

Gillingham chairman Paul Scally hailed his own “special one” after watching his side clinch promotion on Saturday.

And it was a case of “he who dares wins” for the Gills chairman when Mr Scally appointed Martin Allen – nicknamed Mad Dog – as manager last summer.

He said: “He is certainly not mad, that’s for sure, and I don’t know why he has got that nickname.

“I would call him OCD because he has got OCD but it is his OCD-ness that actually makes him special because he does attend to detail.

“Things that other managers would just skip over he goes through them four, five or six times.”

Mr Scally interviewed a number of potential managers in the summer but finally went with his instincts and selected Allen.

He said: “I had been talking with Martin on and off or the last five or six years. We have always got on well, the chemistry is good.

“He is different, there is no doubt about that, but we needed someone different. If we bought a manager in similar to what we have had previously it would have been just the same sort of season. I thought we needed to rattle a few cages.

“There are a lot of chairman who are fearful of him so that will work in our favour because he is not going to be an easy touch and certainly wouldn’t be an easy touch to manage in the Premier League.

“But then if chairmen aren’t bold enough to go for managers who think outside the box, they are not going to take their clubs anywhere.

“Martin knows here that he gives as good as he gets from me and it’s a good relationship.”

Mr Scally has no plans at the moment of extending Allen’s contract, which runs for another season.

He said: “We haven’t even talked about it. I was warned off him by a number of chairmen before I appointed him because they said he was too hard to handle. But he isn’t hard to handle if you respect him and treat him the way he needs to be treated. That’s just man-management.”