Paul Hurst hoping Shrewsbury Town can make West Ham uncomfortable
Paul Hurst wants Shrewsbury Town to make West Ham feel as uncomfortable as possible to avoid FA Cup embarrassment in front of the national cameras.
The Shrewsbury boss is preparing to do third round battle with David Moyes’ Irons on BBC1 on Sunday.
He stressed that, while a significant financial boost, being on television brings added pressure to the League One high-fliers.
Hurst said: “With our home record and how strong we’ve been, we’ve got a slight chance and ultimately again that’s why we know we’re on TV. It’s for that reason.
“I think that also makes it a slightly more difficult game for us though, because they wouldn’t want to get embarrassed anyway, and certainly not on national TV, so that maybe makes it slightly harder. But we’ll do everything we can to try and be the story of the weekend.
“The problem we’ve got is we know we’ve got a nice stadium, we know that the pitch is a good surface, so it’s not going to be like some FA Cup ties when maybe teams are going to places and they’re really unhappy with the surroundings.
“But we’ve got to try and make it as uncomfortable as possible, certainly on the pitch. The crowd can hopefully play their part.”
Hurst admitted guesswork is required when predicting a West Ham line-up. The top flight side are set to rest several first-team stars after facing West Brom and Tottenham in the week.
But the boss is focused on his own team. He said: “It will be a bit of guesswork going into it and even their system, I don’t know if they’ll stick to what they’ve been doing or not, so from that point of view it’s not the easiest.
“But maybe we just think about ourselves to a degree.
“The season doesn’t depend on this game or anything like that, so we will look forward to it. They’ve kept their focus and now they have got the right to look forward to the game. We want to do ourselves justice.”
