Shrewsbury v Morecambe: Match preview

Town welcome relegation rivals Morecambe to Montgomery Waters Meadow looking to increase their four-point buffer to the 21st-placed visitors.

The Shrimps, promoted from League Two last season, occupy the drop-zone position a number of clubs are fighting to steer clear of.

Cotterill’s men are hunting a first win in eight league games after a run of five draws and two defeats, in which goals have been difficult to come by.

The manager admitted his side ‘have not been free-scoring’ since his appointment but, despite 28 goals in 32 league games this term, he is confident stats including expected goals (xG) and crosses into the opponents’ box show an intent to be creative and score.

“What stats don’t sometimes do is say where you’ve been with your travelling, where you are that week, where the lads are with their tiredness,” said Cotterill in referencing Town covering 1,600 miles in away matches over two-and-a-half weeks.

“I just think they’ve given their all for the football club and continue to in all the time I’ve been here.

“We’ve had very few performances where you think ‘you didn’t yourselves justice today, or me justice, or our fans or the club justice’.

“When I look back over the last seven or eight games where we’ve had quite a few draws and a couple of defeats, the stats we’re talking about our expected goals.

“We got beat 1-0 by Plymouth last weekend and our expected goals was more than theirs. We were at 1.2 and they’re at 0.8 but they win the game 1-0.

“We’ve had that against Fleetwood, Wimbledon, Bolton, Crewe, Sheffield Wednesday, all of late.

“We cross the ball more than any other team in the division, there’s only Rotherham, Wycombe, Oxford, Sheffield Wednesday that get more crosses into the box – and they can be 4-3-3 sides who have two men in wide areas, rather than one with our wing-backs. And with our expected goals, if you look at for and against, we should be something like 13th in the table, just over 43 points and that would be just six points off the play-offs.”

Shrewsbury strikers and top scorers Daniel Udoh and Ryan Bowman boast 20 goals between them this term, though the latter is without a goal since Boxing Day. Six-goal midfielder Luke Leahy does return from suspension tomorrow.

Town, 15th in the home form table this term with Morecambe second-bottom for away form, welcome Steve Robinson’s Shrimps side who are without a win themselves in five games. The manager – who said 75 per cent of training time is focused on attacking – continued: “It’s not that we’re not creating chances, that the boys aren’t trying or giving their all. You can’t have two or three lads all the time scoring the goals.

“Because they’ll get tired, injured, suspended, a potential loss of form. Our boys have done really, really well this year. I think we’ve competed in every game we’ve played, yes we’ve had to defend more than we’d like against Wycombe, it was a really good point on an awkward night.

“Then we go all the way down to Plymouth and I while I don’t say we deserved to win it, we didn’t deserve to get beat.”