Mark Bonner hails 10-man Gillingham’s ‘amazing mentality’ in Tranmere win

Mark Bonner hailed his side’s “amazing mentality” after 10-man Gillingham beat Tranmere 3-0.

Armani Little opened the scoring early in the second half before Ethan Coleman’s sending-off on the hour.

Under-fire winger Jayden Clarke came off the bench to bag a late brace, his first goals of the season.

And Bonner, whose side sit a point off the top of Sky Bet League Two, said: “It’s a brilliant win.

“We made the game difficult for ourselves again with the sending off.

“But the mentality of the team when it goes against us is amazing.

“You want to respond well with a good result when you’ve had a difficult day like last weekend and when it goes against you in games. That’s the story you build together.

“The lads, whenever they’re having a drink with a break in play, they’re saying ‘we’ve been here before’ and when you have those experiences to fall back on it gives you a way to handle that.

“We really had that clean sheet mentality, we had it against Chesterfield as well, chasing lost causes, bodies on the line.

“The energy in that team today was fantastic.

“We want to be hard to beat here and entertain where we can. We are trying to build a resilience, a togetherness and a work ethic.”

And Bonner reserved special praise for Clarke after a tough start to the season so far.

He added: “I’m really happy for Jayden because he gets a lot of stick.

“He works his socks off. He’s come off the bench and done really well. Days like this are great for him.

“Like many of the players, he needs to back himself a bit more.”

Rovers had conceded just once in the league before being caught on the counter at Priestfield.

And boss Nigel Adkins said: “The goals we conceded we were in the final third of the pitch, we were trying to attack, be creative and give them issues and then they’ve gone down the other end and scored.

“We were trying to force ourselves to create issues to try and win the game of football.

“You can look round in the cold light of day when we’ve lost the ball to make a foul in their corner so they don’t go down the length of the pitch, but is that what the game should be?

“I can’t fault the effort, but maybe one or two lads should do better in their performances.

“Our endeavour was to try and win a game of football. We couldn’t just sit in and defend. We knew we had to compete and we have done.

“Unfortunately, when they’ve gone down to 10 men they’ve sat in and caught us on the counter.”