Leon Legge was encouraged by the performance as Gillingham scored their first goal of the season on Saturday and got off the mark in League 1 at the third attempt.

The defender insisted they had done enough to win the game before the disappointment of Farid El Alagui’s injury-time equaliser for Brentford.

Legge said: “It was heartbreaking, really. I tried to get as close as I could to Farid as the ball’s come back in, but he’s hit it down into the ground and it’s gone up into the top corner.

“You’d say before the game if we got a point against one of the promotion favourites then you’d take it. But the game we just played, we felt definitely we deserved the three.”

Gillingham worked hard to put last week’s 4-0 defeat at League 1 title favourites Wolves behind them and it showed in a battling performance.

Legge said: “It was a much better performance than last week. We’ve had a long week in training where we’ve talked about what we were going to do in this game.

“Everyone got round each other, fought for every first and second ball and we made it a hard game for them. We’ve got a tough run but we’ve just got to keep morale up."