Elkan Baggott was a pre-match doubt for Gillingham after a head injury at the weekend but it didn’t stop him going in where it hurt.

Baggott nodded in Gills’ opening goal against Dagenham and got another bruise to the head when attacking a cross in the second half. It was all smiles for him at the final whistle, though.

“I have given myself another lump but I just try and get my head on the ball as much as I can,” said the Indonesian international after their 3-2 win.

“I was feeling fine. I got taken off the other day (against Salford) more as a precaution. I had a golf ball (sized bruise) on the side of my eye which has, thankfully, gone down now but in terms of concussion, there was none of that so it was fine.

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“As a team, we are happy that we are going through, the objective we kept drilling into ourselves was Leicester at home in the Third Round, we used that as our motivation and, thankfully, we managed to get the job done in the 90 minutes.”

The Gills were a goal down before Baggott got on the end of Ben Reeves’ corner to level it up before the break.

Baggott said: “Reevesy put in a great ball again. I said to him just before the corner, 'just hang it up', because the player who was blocking me wasn’t getting tight so I had a run on the ball every time so I could attack it. Thankfully, I managed to get my head on it and it dropped in.”

Fellow centre-half Max Ehmer then put Gills 2-1 up.

Goals from anywhere are important for the Gills, having only managed six in the league.

“As a team, we have not scored too many goals at the moment but in all areas of the pitch, strikers or defenders, we have to chip in as much as we can,” said the Ipswich Town loanee.

“Set-pieces are a big threat and a good way for us to score because we have size, thankfully we managed to utilise that as best we could.”

Dagenham got one back to level at 2-2 but Hakeeb Adelakun won it, starting a breakaway move and finishing it.

“It was an unbelievably worked goal,” said the defender, “especially so late in the game, to have the legs to get up the pitch, it was really good.

“In training, he slots them in left and right so it is about time that would happen in the game and thankfully for the whole team he did it.”

Now, the team have a game against Leicester City to look forward to in Round Three on January 7.

“That is far away from us,” said Baggott. “Our main focus is trying to turn our league form around, we are not in great form, we need to do something about it, our main focus is on Bradford this Sunday.

“The key thing is that we need to take our cup form into the league, it is all well and good being on these cup runs, but the league is really important to us and we need to flip our form around and get some results.”