THINGS are getting bad when I’m reduced to lighting up a cigarette in the toilets at half-time in the vague hope of being expelled from the ground and maybe banned for the rest of the season. A few others had the same idea, too; we stood around, yearning for the stewards to turn up, none of us wishing to witness another 45 minutes like that.

They banned smoking in the ground at the beginning of the latest season, as if the uplifting delights to be witnessed on the pitch in front of us would provide narcotic sustenance of its own.

But there is nothing very pleasurable about football, really. I took the kids - a form of punishment, as they’d been a bit lippy. More usually, when kids get taken to a game of football, it is a treat for which they are grateful. But this season (and the last, and the one before that) I feel I have to offer them a real treat afterwards to compensate; bowling, or something. This was a ghastly and gut-wrenching match for both sets of fans, the sub-heading being, loser goes down. Two sets of fans who do not particularly like one another and are considered in some quarters (although not around here) to be local rivals, both down on their luck, enmired in poverty and misery.

Gillingham are hovering before the welcoming embrace of administration, which could come at any time. Fourth from bottom of League One, a defeat here would have almost sealed their fate. Millwall, a couple of places and points above them, on a very bad run indeed. Millwall’s excuse for seeming to have not the slightest notion of how to score goals is that a remarkable 15 first-team players are out injured at the moment. I don’t know what they do in the treatment room down at The Den. But in any case, it’s a thin excuse. The ones who are injured - well, they ain’t Cristiano Ronaldo, you know? They wouldn’t make that much of a difference, if we’re being honest.

Anyway, the game. Millwall began with the vague intimations of purpose, as if it were conceivable that they might win. Inept, fumbling and witless in attack, though, any notion of threat evaporated by about the 20th minute. A little later, Gillingham scored, one of the few moments of genuine class in a game that, for most of the time, resembled two flocks of storks on ice skates chasing a balloon. A free kick was needlessly conceded on the left-hand edge of Millwall’s penalty box. Nicky Southall smacked the ball high and hard over the wall and into the extremely large gap Rhys Evans had rather generously left in his goal.

The second half involved Millwall doing that thing they have needed to do so very often this season - “press” for an equaliser. This almost never involves the players doing stuff like having a shot at goal, but instead running around in circles, like a lab rat injected with LSD. The equaliser, when it came, so shocked me I almost choked on my pie, Paul Robinson swivelling round and shooting from the edge of the area. There were, following this late reprieve, flurries of activity at either end and, frankly, Gillingham looked the more likely to score. But a draw is pretty much what the game deserved and, of course, it settles nothing.

Millwall fans will tell you that this is the worst team they’ve seen in 40 or 50 years, and they may be right, but it would be a close call, frankly.

I’ve seen ones that ran it pretty close in the early 1980s, for a start. They’ll remind you that it is only four years since they were playing in the FA Cup final and thrilling the nation by kicking lumps out of Ronaldo. But the FA Cup and those years challenging for Premier League status were the aberration, not this stuff today. Gillingham fans, meanwhile, complain they have been let down by their chairman.

Well, maybe again. The truth though is that neither of these teams, much though their supporters might complain otherwise, is underachieving very much at all right now. You just hope that they’re both around in some division this time next year.

Teams: Millwall:Evans, Senda, Robinson, Craig, Frampton, Brkovic (Martin 61min), Fuseini, Laird, Smith (Simpson 55min), Savage, Harris

Gillingham:Stillie, Southall, Cullip, King, Richards, Fuller, Crofts, Bentley, Miller (Griffiths ht), Jackson, Oli (Ba ht)

Scorers: Millwall:Robinson 75 Gillingham:Southall 25

Referee:S Bratt Attendance: 10,006