Mark Bentley became the latest Gillingham player to fall victim to a mystery stomach bug on Tuesday night.

The Gillingham defender was substituted after just 33 minutes in the game against Darlington and manager Mark Stimson has vowed to find the source of the bug.

Bentley became the third player in a fortnight to contract the illness after Curtis Weston and Dennis Oli were also substituted in games with the same problem.

“It’s something we’re going to look at in the club,” said Stimson. “We do something where the food is cooked at the ground and taken to the training ground in a van and maybe something might have been caught on the way up. It’s happening too often at the moment.

“We’ve got to identify it because it’s no good having players wanting to come off after 15, 20 minutes and feeling unwell. It’s something we have to look into.

“We want to try and eat together as a group to try and get that bonding thing. When I took over at the club it was an horrendous situation what the players were doing eating wise. It was crazy. We’ve tried to change that but we might have to try something else now.

“We don’t want players missing because we don’t have that many.”