Gillingham manager Steve Lovell has demanded his players show they have the bottle for a fight.

The Gills have dropped back into trouble after going eight game without a win in League 1.

With two weeks left of the season the Gills still aren’t safe from relegation and Saturday’s 3-0 home loss to Blackpool leaves them too close to the bottom four for comfort.

It left Lovell asking questions of his players.

He said: “If people haven’t got the courage to stand up to things like this, then perhaps they are not good enough for us.

“We need people with courage and people who have the bottle to deal with things like this.

“Football is not plain sailing, if they are going to push on in their careers, they are going to come up against things like this. If they can’t handle it at this level then they are not going to handle it anywhere else. They have to stand up and be counted.”

The Gills looked to have put relegation fears behind them after climbing into 10th position at the end of January, with a chance of gatecrashing the play-off race. Lovell had taken over a team sitting second from bottom.

But since then the Gills have won just twice in their last 15 games, a run of form that has seen them return back into the lower reaches of the table.

“For the majority of the year they have been brilliant,” said the Gills boss, who insists his players know what is now at stake.

“But the last five weeks, they have been sliding into that mould where they are just trying to get over that line. They look at papers, they look at the table, they know exactly what needs to be done.

“It is getting tighter and tighter and closer and closer, it is still not over, we have to make sure that in the next two games we do pull out a couple of results.

“Let’s see the character of the boys this week.

“Hopefully we go down to Bristol Rovers (next weekend) and put right what they didn’t do on Saturday.

"They owe everyone a performance, they owe the club one and they owe me one because I feel really let down by them and that is the first time since I have been here that I can say that, very let down, especially in the circumstances, where three points would have made us near enough safe.”