Gillingham chairman Paul Scally criticised Ken Bates for the comments he made in yesterday’s programme notes.

Bates said sending them down would be "poetic justice" because Scally has been outspoken in his backing for the Football League after they deducted 15 points from Leeds.

Scally claims Bates has unfairly singled him out, causing the barracking he received from the majority of the crowd. He told the BBC “I was one of 63 chairmen who voted to support the action against Leeds for misdemeanours carried out by the people running Leeds at the time. They broke the regulations, got punished by the Football League board of directors and we were asked whether we supported the board.

It was an anonymous vote and I was happy to come out and say I was one of the ones who supported the board. Because of that - and Ken has whipped it up - there were 36,000 out there who think I'm the reason they lost 15 points and that clearly wasn't the case. Ken Bates has disappointed me enormously. I'm stunned by the way he's behaved."

Basically, this is a clash of two massive egos. Bates wasn’t just complaining about Gillingham’s vote against us at the Football League meeting, but the way Scally has been so outspoken on this issue throughout the season.

Scally has been a controversial figure for some time, and he is generally unpopular with Gillingham fans. They don’t trust his motives in transferring ownership of the ground from the club to a company he controls. And he banned a fan called Alan Liptrott for several years, not for any violent conduct, but because of a dispute over a domain name that Liptrott had obtained perfectly legally.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that Scally and Bates have had so much to say about each other in this dispute.

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