Tom Flanagan: Shrewsbury Town’s stubbornness is a whole team effort

Salop have defended well in most of their games this season – apart from the home defeat to Ipswich at the weekend.

Town welcomed Championship outfit Burnley to the Meadow this week, and limited them to very few clear-cut chances.

Salop’s back three of Tom Flanagan, Chey Dunkley and Matthew Pennington have been the mainstay of Steve Cotterill’s defence this campaign, with the centre-backs starting every game.

And Flanagan is pleased with how Town have defended as a unit on the whole.

He said: “I think it is going well.

“Marko is not sitting around with nothing to do.

“He is having a bit of work to do so we have got a lot of thanks to him.”

The defender also said Salop are defending well as a team.

He continued: “But also, we are a little bit more solid across midfield.

“And when we play with the two up top, they know their jobs.

“We can keep them on one side of the pitch.

“This helps because we know where they are coming from.

“I mean it is going to go wrong sometimes, and people are going to take chances, and that is the job, pleased on the whole.

“We are not pleased about the game against Ipswich we are but pleased on the whole.”

Meanwhile, boss Cotterill said he was proud of his players despite them being knocked out of the Carabao Cup by the Clarets. A second-half goal by Samuel Bastien was enough for the visitors to earn a 1-0 victory.

But despite their Lancashire opponents having more quality on the pitch, they did not create

too many chances to score, and Shrewsbury almost snatched an equaliser at the end when Chey Dunkley headed in, but it was adjudged to be offside.

“Really proud of the players,” the boss said on the game. “I thought they were fantastic, absolutely fantastic.

“I thought they were great.

“We didn’t deserve to lose the game I don’t feel. We had more shots on target and had more efforts.

“We didn’t have the possession, but that is going to happen anyway.

“We made a mistake when they got an overload for the goal.

“They got three against two, and we didn’t stop the cross.

“All in all, I am only disappointed with the result because I don’t think we deserved that.”

Town set up defensively for the game and only had 19 per cent possession.

And the boss said that when you play sides like Burnley, you have to adapt the way you play to try and get a positive result.

Cotterill continued: “You can’t push all game against them.

“You can’t do what we did in the second half we’ll get picked off and get beat 3-0. We couldn’t do that.

“So tactically, the game has to be different for us than it can be for them.

“Also, you are asking lads to go again and do another shift against a good team.

“We made some changes tonight, but as it goes on, they are going to get more and more tired.

“I was really pleased with them.”