Gillingham produced a defensive performance to forget on Saturday and manager Mark Stimson had to admit that even his best defenders were at fault during the 4-0 thrashing at Bury.

“As good as Simon King is, that was probably one of his worst performances since I’ve been here,” said Stimson.

“It’s a long season and he’s played so well and alongside him John Nutter didn’t have his best game.

“When two of your back four don’t hit seven out of 10 against a team like Bury they’re going to punish you.

“King will get over it because he’s a great professional and I’m sure he’s one of them looking forward to Tuesday night. He’ll get out there in the freezing cold and run around and get us the win we want.”

All of Bury’s goals came from crosses into the box.

“Some of their deliveries were hard to defend,” admitted Stimson. “You have to ask people questions. Can you get in people’s ways, can you block them?

“We’re going to come up against teams in this division with four or five players six foot-plus who work on set pieces.

“We played Rotherham last week, who score a lot of goals from set pieces, and we looked really solid. You think that’s okay, we’ll go to Bury and hope to do the same. That didn’t happen and that’s probably the inconsistency of players at this level.”

Despite the scoreline Stimson still felt his side were a match for their free-scoring hosts.

“There wasn’t much difference between the two sides,” he said. “But in certain areas we didn’t perform as well as we did two weeks ago.

“To go into the break 2-0 down was disappointing because I didn’t think we deserved that. Then to concede two in the second half and to miss a penalty, it’s been a bad trip.”