Yeovil Town 4 Gillingham 3

GILLINGHAM manager Ronnie Jepson praised his players’ fighting spirit after they almost rescued a point at Yeovil on Saturday.

Jepson’s side battled back from a 4-1 deficit with 10 men, after a controversial early sending-off and pushed their hosts right until the final whistle.

Defeat ended Gills’ six-game winning run and with it the chance to equal the club’s all-time record for successive league victories.

But Jepson opted to take the positives from a game that Gillingham were leading until Brent Sancho’s 16th-minute red-card saw the tide turn.

The Gills boss said: "It’s come to an end. It would have been nice to come to an end 11 versus 11, but we still made a fight of it and that was the most pleasing aspect of it for me.

"I’m proud of the lads, they stuck to the task when they could have gone under. They never threw the towel in, they kept going and so did the supporters as well, they kept behind us and the lads went to the wire."

Referee Brian Curson’s decision to award Yeovil a penalty and send Sancho walking for the same incident was clearly a sore point for Jepson but he chose to bite his tongue.

He said: "I don’t think it was exactly fair. It’s not much use speaking to him (referee) though because the damage has already been done."

Sancho will now serve a one-match ban, missing Saturday’s home game against Walsall, unless Jepson sees fit to dispute the sending-off with the FA.