Gillingham’s management were delighted to see the team exit the EFL Trophy on a high.

Defeats from their first two group games meant Tuesday’s match against Tottenham’s under-21s was nothing more than a chance for fringe players to show their worth.

Report: Gillingham 2 Tottenham 0

Many did that and assistant boss Paul Raynor spoke of his pleasure at watching the performance, having been less than impressed in their previous Trophy matches.

He said: “The competition had been a disappointment with the two defeats, and not particularly good performances, and we made that very clear to the boys.

“Although we couldn’t qualify we wanted a good performance to go out with and the guys displayed that. There were some good individual performances and collectively a good performance form the guys and we had a deserved 2-0 win.”

Tottenham were also knocked out of the competition. They needed a win to progress and for Ipswich to beat Colchester in the other group match.

The visitors had a team of gifted youngsters but struggled to make any of their possession count.

Raynor said: “Tottenham have got some skilful and gifted players, which they are always going to have with a club of that quality but we dealt with them well, we nullified the threat.

“They had a bright 10-15 minutes and then we identified the problems they were causing us and managed to sort that out and we grew into the game.

“We were a real threat, especially down the right hand side in the first half, we created a number of opportunities and fortunately Alex Jakubiak took one late in the half, which I think we deserved, on balance of play.

“I thought we were always in control, even second half. Tottenham had a lot of the ball but they didn’t really penetrate us, we kept a good solid shape.

“On transition we didn’t really do a lot on the break. With better decision making we could have gone onto score a couple more goals, but it wasn’t quite as good as it should have been. That’s nit-picking and on the whole it was a good, solid, controlled performance.”