Gillingham's exciting pre-season plans are now in the balance following football's prolonged shutdown.

Boss Steve Evans told fans on Wednesday, during a Q&A session, that he had lined up a Premier League and Championship side to visit Priestfield in the summer.

But with the country in lockdown and football on hold, all of the planning needs to be re-done.

Gillingham have nine games to go this season, one that was due to finish on the first weekend of May. That now would be the earliest date they could restart but is still optimistic, unless games are played behind closed doors.

As far as pre-season goes, Evans is hoping to give his side some strong opposition to test themselves against.

He said: “We had a Championship and Premier League opposition confirmed, both to come to Preistfield, in July, but now we are juggling and we don’t know where we are going.

“We had organised two fixtures at home and organised a couple of fixtures away from home, one at Conference National and one at Conference South level, very much different to what I inherited when I came in, where we had a lot of games against much lower opposition, much further down the county, almost in the sea.

“We played our pre-season games nearly in France! That will still be the case, because we got well hosted by the likes of Faversham, Folkestone and Dover, brilliant clubs and brilliant people, Hessy (the Dover manager) a friend of mine of course, but we will probably have a look at all of this in three or four weeks when we return to work, hopefully.”

More on the Gills;

Kitman announces his departure

Evans: We all have to do our bit

Scally: Premier League could help