Gillingham are expecting offers for some of their players next month and manager Steve Evans is preparing should the club decide to cash in.

Big striker Vadaine Oliver and classy captain Kyle Dempsey are both expected to be back from injury in January, when the transfer window reopens. Once again they are likely to be wanted by teams higher up the league.

The Gills haven’t released details of contract lengths in recent years but it is believed that both Oliver and Dempsey will be free agents in the summer, along with promising young defender Jack Tucker.

In the last few days Evans has held meetings with chairman Paul Scally to outline where he thinks they need to strengthen. The manager wants to make changes to his squad, as he has done in the previous two seasons at the halfway stage.

Evans said: “He knows my thoughts towards January and what we would like to do and I said to him, ‘let me continue to go and look’, to keep making my calls and for (assistant manager) Paul Raynor to do his bit.

“We will probably sit down after Charlton (on Wednesday next week) and firm it up and say, ‘this is what we are going to do’. We are trying to get to the stage where we have a clear picture in our heads.

“We know there will be offers coming in for some of our boys coming back into the team, we know that.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s Gillingham or Leeds United, what you do is say if that offer is to be accepted, then as the chairman said, ‘Steve you always have to present me with options’, and that is how we have always worked.

“At Peterborough we sold Jack Marriott [selling him to Derby for £4m in 2018] and we came up with options and Ivan Toney was one of them and look at that now [the striker excelled at Posh and eventually left for Brentford for a reported £10m].

“It is my job to make sure that in all positions we have players we like, players we would like to bring in, targets, it is even more important in key positions where we think we need to strengthen but it is also key to say that we will need to offload to upload.

“No club, unless you are the likes of Ipswich, can just go and sign some more players. They only have 29-30 players. But I have been at that level where you don't need to worry about putting them out and just getting players in.

“We have to make sure we can balance it as best we can for the chairman to make sure this club is in a reasonable and prudent state going forward. That is essential. Every supporters would want to be like that.

“If we didn’t change a player and we have the likes of Dempsey and Oliver and keep our loan players and Tucker, we will be winning matches, but our problem is that we have been robbed of their services at such a key time and we are desperate to get them back.”