Gillingham manager Mark Stimson believes the club’s failure to pay certain players off quickly has hindered his hopes of keeping the Gills in League 1.

The club agreed financial settlements with senior players David Graham, Steve Lomas, Craig Armstring and Ian Cox but Stimson wished they had been paid off sooner.

Stimson said: "I’ve always said I wished the club would have come to a financial agreement and paid off some players quicker than we did, because all of the good work we were doing was getting undone within 20 minutes after training.

"Unfortunately players listen to players and they don’t trust the managerial staff enough.

"Whatever we were saying on the training ground, senior players didn’t think it was the way forward because we were asking them to do some exercise and run around the pitch.

"When I took over, there were players happy to sit mid-table in Division 1 and I can’t work with people like that.

"We had to be gentle with them. Because one, they weren’t physically capable of doing it and two, mentally they didn’t want to entertain it and it took a bit too long to get some of those out of the club.

"I gave the players the opportunity but what did it for me was Barnet away. That was my worst game in charge by an absolute mile. I’ve been beaten at Hartlepool and Northampton 4-0 but the players and the football at Barnet was nothing short of a disgrace.

"That’s why I had to make wholesale changes because otherwise we would have just got bashed every week and I didn’t want to be part of that."