Steve Lovell is determined to get Gillingham playing after seeing first-hand their struggles this season.

Lovell has been a regular at Priestfield and has seen dwindling crowds grow frustrated with both the style of football and results under former boss Steve Evans.

The returning caretaker manager intends to change the team’s approach and get smiles on faces.

They’ve won only three games and are seven points off safety in the League 1 table.

“It’s hard to say what the problem has been,” Lovell said.

“I can only watch games from my perspective.

“Every manager has their own way of playing so I can’t say what was going wrong in the way the old manager wanted to play because he might have seen things that were working the right way for him.

“All I can say from my point of view is if it was my team I wouldn’t be happy with the way they were playing or the way they were set up.

“Everybody’s got a way of playing and different ideas but certainly from my perspective, there’s a lot of work I need to do on the training ground.

“We’ve started that and we’ve got until the weekend to put it all together against Burton.

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“I’m enjoying it, the players have responded brilliantly and that’s all you can ask for.”

Fans criticised Evans’ direct brand of football as Gillingham struggled for results, going 13 games without a win in all competitions before his weekend departure.

Lovell wants his side to be flexible.

“You want to try and get goals but it’s how you do it,” he said. “There’s different ways of doing it.

“You can’t have one way, it’s got to be a mixture of when to play and when to go direct and that’s the decision-making and the understanding we’ve got to get into the players.

“It’s not just get the ball and kick it up to the forwards and let them deal with it and then we’ll get support up there. It’s not that.

“It’s how we get the ball up there, how do we work it, how do we get it through the midfield, how do we get support into the forwards.

“It’s a lot of things to get right and it’ll take a lot of work but as long as the players are willing to learn, I’m sure the performances will improve as we go on.”