Shrewsbury's chance at history shot keeps season running

Shrewsbury Town will walk out in front of their biggest League One attendance by some way in the North East tomorrow, at a raucous and reignited Stadium of Light.

Sunderland, managed by Alex Neil since the Scot replaced Lee Johnson in February, have played in front of crowds of more than 30,000 for much of the campaign and a current eight-game unbeaten run – featuring five wins – will get the pulses racing on Wearside again as the sixth-placed Black Cats look to seal a play-off spot.

Sunderland are made of sterner stuff now. They have scored eight goals beyond the 80th minute in Neil’s 10 games in charge.

Interestingly, given this is Sunderland fourth successive campaign in League One, Town have only played there once in front of supporters – 2019/20 was halted and 2020/21 was behind closed doors. That one occasion, in December 2018, brought the biggest attendance Town have ever played league football in front of (33,288).

It has been a long time coming and the prospect of a dead rubber won’t keep Salop fans from travelling up the M1 on a Bank Holiday Friday.

Steve Cotterill’s side have another score to settle and a bit of history to write. Town have not won in seven attempts at either Roker Park or the Stadium of Light. Last season’s fixture was the first league game to take place after Cotterill was taken ill with Covid.

One interesting piece of team news will be whether or not Cotterill opts to reward Shaun Whalley for his late heroics against Ipswich last weekend.

Whalley, 34, is yet to start a game since returning from a lengthy injury last month and has stated his desire to make the starting XI as often as possible in these final four fixtures before the expiration of his contract in the summer. Salop, in 16th, have an interested party in the shape of defender Tom Flanagan, who swapped Sunderland for Shropshire in January in a surprising move following Johnson’s exit.

The hosts are checking on the fitness of influential attacker Alex Pritchard, who missed last week’s last-gasp win at Oxford. Pritchard scored a fine opener in the 1-1 draw at Shrewsbury in November.

Cotterill, meanwhile, has spoken on his pride at how his honest Town side play the game at face value after the red card to Ipswich’s Cameron Burgess last week.

“We’ve had players sent off this season and we wouldn’t appeal things if we thought they were frivolous,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of appeals this season I think, or certainly one, so it doesn’t matter to us another team goes down to 10 men.

“He doesn’t need to make that challenge. We did not exacerbate the situation, Marko (Marosi) stood on his feet.

“Marko hasn’t gone down, we’ve had people (against us) go down, rolling around all around the place and getting our players sent off.

“We don’t need to make any apologies for anything like that, Marko didn’t go down, that’s what our team does – our team doesn’t do all of that business unless they are hurt.

“I said to the referee at the end last week that I didn’t know if there were so many bookings in the game, there were bookings that didn’t need to be bookings. It was just a competitive game between two competitive teams.”