Shrewsbury's Ryan Bowman shown ‘rapid improvement’

Bowman sat out the draw with Derby County at Montgomery Waters Meadow on Tuesday night with a minor back problem that was also affecting his hip and groin.

However, after resting Bowman was able to return to the training ground yesterday and was back running on the grass.

And Cotterill says the forward will be closely monitored today. “He’s far better than where he was,” said Cotterill of the 30-year-old. “He’s been out on the grass – hopefully no setbacks and he’s fine.

“There has been a rapid improvement in him and I would be disappointed if he wasn’t available for selection at the weekend after how it’s gone.”

The boss has been encouraged by recent performances and hopes that with back-to-back home games against the divisions two big guns, fans will also get behind the players, as they did against the Rams on Tuesday.

“We always need the fans behind us because we will come up against teams that will come to our place, like Derby did and like Ipswich will on Saturday, and they’ll fill that end,” added Cotterill. “Normally, when we play these games, I think our fans are up for the challenge and I think they have been. Hopefully that will continue.”

It has been a frantic schedule so far for all clubs in the Football League and Cotterill has been forced to tailor his preparations ahead of fixtures due to the busy fixture list.

“There’s a fair bit of work you would do in the classroom,” he added. “We’ll have a meeting and discuss things there that we can’t perhaps do out on the training ground (yesterday) but we’ll do more of our work on the training ground (today) and hopefully finish off our preparation for Ipswich.”