Shrewsbury still have targets to reach before the summer
As Shrewsbury Town turn to the final handful of League One matches this season, the squad will look to show minds are still focused on the task at hand.
And that challenge is to continue their show of progression and improvement.
Ipswich Town are the visitors to Montgomery Waters Meadow tomorrow. The Tractor Boys are ninth – three places and eight points off the play-off places.
Their top six hopes took a major blow with a 1-0 defeat to Cambridge last weekend. But those aspirations still exist – just about – albeit are slimming.
On the face of it the visitors have more to play for than Steve Cotterill’s hosts – an 11-point buffer to the bottom four is highly unlikely to be made up.
But that does not mean Town can afford to pile on the defeats between now and the end of the month.
Some typical end-of-season shouts of ‘on the beach’ emanated from the Town faithful as their side lost 2-0 on the road at high-flying in-form MK Dons last week.
They were harsh calls. Cotterill’s men were fairly beaten by one of the division’s top sides who happen to be the most in-form club in the country. And on another day it could’ve gone differently.
The challenges don’t get particularly easier. Ipswich were unbeaten in 11 prior to their Cambridge defeat. New rookie boss Kieran McKenna, snapped up from assistant manager at Manchester United in December, has made an eye-catching start.
Should 16th-placed Shrews fall to a defeat at the hands of their visitors tomorrow it does mean the season has unwound, but the side must show evidence in the remaining fixtures that there is meaning in their targets to end the season on a positive note.
It it also worth noting there are some – on paper – more attractive, and winnable fixtures remaining.
Cotterill, by the way, will not accept effort or applications levels tailing off even a percentage before the end of the season, even though doing so can surely be unconscious once a point of safety is reached.
Town won just one of their final nine games last season. That, though, is an unfair correlation to make when you consider factors such as empty stadiums and, of course, Cotterill’s absence through illness.
The Shrews boss is absolutely determined to build on an upturn of performance and form in the second half of this season and salvage what, in the short term and the record books, resembles a good finish.
He was disappointed that his side could not upset MK Dons. The manager revealed his frustration that, having put themselves in a position to leapfrog clubs into as high as 12th, they didn’t take their chance.
Salop, on 48 points, have only bettered 55 League One points once – Paul Hurst’s play-off charge – in their modern history. Doing so again, and achieving anything close to 12th, means positive results can’t be let slip.
