Bowyer on loss at Gillingham, injuries to Page and Aneke and getting minutes into his players

Charlton boss Lee Bowyer was frustrated to lose Chuks Aneke and Lewis Page to hamstring injuries in today's 3-1 pre-season defeat to Gillingham.

Bowyer’s full interview will be available on Valley Pass this evening. Valley Pass costs just £6.50 per month or £60 for the year and you can sign-up here.

Below are some of the talking points.

On the game...

"Obviously, the worst thing is the injuries. Two hamstrings, I don’t know how bad they are but it is not good. It’s not a good way to start, obviously Pagey coming off after 10 minutes and then we have to change everything around. The subs apart from Jonny Williams all trained really hard this morning, so we couldn’t even put one of them on. We would have put Alfie (Doughty) on at left wing back but we couldn’t because he worked so hard this morning. So we had to change the whole thing around. Obviously it was Jonny’s first game, so we had to put him on and then take him off. It just wasn’t our day from start to finish."

On Aneke, who scored his first goal for the club before coming off injured...

"I thought he did well today Chuks. I thought in parts of the game he was very good, especially first half. Hopefully it’s not too bad and they are just little twinges." 

On getting minutes into his players...

"We’ve got so many defenders, we need to try and give them minutes and they are all competing for the start of the season. From back to front everyone is competing, so I want to do the right thing and give everyone minutes. The most important thing is getting minutes into their legs at the moment and most of them got 90 today which is good. I had to take Lyle off, just give him 75, take him off and then maybe give him a bit of time on Tuesday."

On how important the result is...

"The result is not important, the minutes the team got are. Don’t get me wrong I want them to do the right things like I said at the other games. It wasn’t good enough today but that’s why we play these games because we’re going to be rusty, everyone is rusty. I’ll try not to read too much into it, I just want to see them do the right things, or try the right things. When they don’t it disappoints me a bit. I’ve told them we’re only two weeks away now, we’ve got to start picking it up." 

On Gillingham...

"I thought they did well today. I thought they passed it better than us. They passed it with a purpose. They won a lot of individual battles as well, which again is disappointing. These games aren’t going to define how well we do next season, it’s about getting the minutes into them and that is the most important thing, hopefully with no more injuries."

Bowyer’s full interview will be available on Valley Pass this evening. Valley Pass costs just £6.50 per month or £60 for the year and you can sign-up here.

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