Gillingham are set to have their captain back in the squad for the trip to Grimsby Town this weekend.

Fit-again Armani Little comes back into the reckoning after missing the last five games in the league. He hasn’t played since picking up a knock in the away match at Bromley in early September.

“Armani is back around the group now, which is good,” confirmed the Gills assistant on Thursday.

“We've missed him with his leadership and strong influence amongst the group.

“We'll see whether he starts or comes off the bench at the weekend, but he'll be around with us.”

The Gills also have striker Josh Andrews back available after suspension.

“Josh gives us another option in attack,” Dobson said. “We're pretty strong in that area at the moment. We seem to have everybody fit, I believe, at the moment.

“It's a nice problem to have different types of players, different types of ways of doing it. It's always good to be able to have that up your sleeve.”

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The Gills have Andrews, Seb Palmer-Houlden, Sam Vokes, Marcus Wyllie and Elliott Nevitt all chasing a spot upfront.

Dobson has again been in contact with manager Gareth Ainsworth as the manager continues to recover from his heart surgery.

Ainsworth has been chatting with the management team over Zoom this week.

“Gaz is still making those [selection] choices,” said Dobson.

“We'll [speak again and] make a final decision on what that's going to look like at the weekend.

“We're going to have to leave people out of the squad and that’s really harsh. They've trained superbly.

“They've got every right to be disappointed if they're not in the squad because they've trained so well. It’s the tough reality of football sometimes.

“Sometimes it's just people ahead of you that are doing really well and you can't displace them.

“It's great for us when that's the situation. It's horrible when you've got to try and chase it a little bit when you're having poor results, and the players aren't playing well, and you've got to keep rotating to try and find something that works.

“In this situation, it's a really nice problem to have. You could pick any of them at the moment and they're all playing very well.”

Aaron Rowe missed out last weekend through injury and is going to be out again for the game at Grimsby.

Dobson said: “He caught a little bit of an injury. Not too bad. We're hoping that within the next week to ten days he'll be back with us again.

“It wasn't one that we were going to risk the other day. I think a nice thing from Aaron's point of view, certainly refreshing for me, is that he comes to me and says, ‘I want to play Saturday’.

“I said, ‘I don't think you're going to be allowed. We need to get a scan’. The scan came back. There was a little bit of something in there but he was still adamant that he wanted to contribute, which is great. It's exactly what you want.”

Fellow winger Garath McCleary has a calf injury which is likely to keep him out for a couple more weeks.

Loan winger Jonny Smith is also out injured with a calf problem.

Euan Williams, meanwhile, has yet to feature. The attacking midfielder hasn’t played this season since suffering a shoulder injury at the start of pre-season.

“The doctors just put the reins on him a little bit,” Dobson revealed.

“He's not quite there. He's in training. He looks sharp. He just can't do contact at this moment in time. We're just waiting for the green light.

“The good thing is he's doing everything else. He's always the floating player in possession drills, on the outside and a bounce man.

“We've got him involved in as much as we possibly can without taking him to that next step.”