Steve Cotterill: Shrewsbury's lack of goals my biggest bug-bear
Boss Steve Cotterill says Shrewsbury Town’s lack of goals this season is not helped by the absence of an ‘out-and-out natural goalscorer’ at the club.
Town were heading into today’s home clash with Oxford United on the back of successive 0-0 draws.
They had scored 31 goals in 36 League One games and Cotterill said: “To be honest, so much gets talked about the goals. Does anyone not think that we don’t want to score in every game? But I suppose it has to be a talking point.
“When you keep clean sheets, people think you’re a defensive team. No, we’re not. It couldn’t be any further from the truth.
“I’ve had a team that’s won this league with 99 points and scored over 100 goals in a season.
“So, if anybody anywhere thinks we’re happy with the amount of goals we’ve scored, we’re not.
“But the only thing is when you’re a work in progress, when you haven’t got a lot of money at a football club, it takes a while to get everything how you want to get it.
“That would probably be my biggest bug-bear at the club, that we haven’t scored enough goals.
“But you can work with the boys, you can practice, you can train.
“You can do all those things and at the end of the day, if you haven’t got what you would call an out-and-out natural goalscorer in your club, (it’s tough).
“And when you do get one, you never want him to go out of contract and you want to keep him.
“So, we’re still in search of another goalscorer – but not just a goalscorer that’s a striker.
“We talk about goals that we’ve got to get from all around the pitch – from wing-back areas, from midfield, the strikers on top.
“We always knew Dan (Udoh) and Ryan (Bowman) weren’t going to keep scoring, but that means the others have to chip in and take responsibility. We create enough chances to score goals. End of story. The lads know it themselves – I won’t hang lads out to dry. We know, all around, goalscoring has to be upped.”
Cotterill, who is pleased not to have a team ‘full of mavericks that don’t run around’, added: “Could we do with one that could open doors? Of course we could.
“But they’re few and far between, and sometimes out of our reach financially. That’s the end of it, really. That’s what we have to do there.”
