Dave Edwards: Work still to be done, but Shrewsbury ready for season

For Matt Taylor, he’ll know which players he has available and hope he doesn’t get any injuries.

For the players, it’s exciting going into the final week before the season starts. You know all the hard work and all the running is done, and it will be a lot more tactical this week.

In terms of the performance against Notts County, you can’t read too much into it. Notts County were actually very good and kept the ball extremely well.

It’s still a work in progress for Matt Taylor’s team. There’s things he saw that will really help him select his team for the opening game against Cheltenham.

It’s quite nice, in a roundabout way, that you don’t blow away the opposition in the last pre-season game and you go into the season with a false sense of security, where you think you’re in a really good place. That’s happened to me before and then you get a shock.

The difficulties in that game will put Shrewsbury in a good place with a few problems to solve this week.

I was delighted to see Dan Udoh get his goal. He was the stand-out player for Shrewsbury. He has that desire to do so well this season and you’ll have to put the reins on him at times, especially because of his work ethic.

It was really positive for him and great for him to get a goal. If Shrewsbury start the season well, Dan Udoh will be key to that.

It was interesting to see Carl Winchester play as a wing-back. Ideally you want to see him in midfield and in the heart of the play, not just for what he can do with the ball and his fitness but also because of his experience at this level.

Hopefully we’ll see him back in the centre of midfield and we’ll see Elliott Thorpe at right-wing-back.

I also noticed Shrewsbury played a midfield three with one holding and two number eights, which Steve Cotterill also used a lot last season.

I think, however, it might be better to see two holding. Someone like Nohan Kenneh next to Winchester, which gives you a stable base, and then you can have Tom Bayliss who is a more natural number 10. I think it would suit him to have more freedom.

All in all, they’ve had a good pre-season, although it’s obvious the team is very light.

They need more signings – the team isn’t anywhere near as strong enough as the manager would want it to be.

But there is a month left in the window. They have six faces through the door, not all of them are League One ready yet, so they probably need to get another four players that are ready to come straight into the starting XI.

They’ll need to use the loan market extremely well and the problem they have is the players they are looking at, their parent clubs haven’t made their minds up yet.

Some Premier League and Championship clubs are waiting to get their own players in and don’t want to loan some young lads just yet.

With that, there might be a few deals to be done for Shrewsbury at the end of the window.

You just hope Shrewsbury start the season in a positive manner, as they do have the foundations of a very good squad – they just need more players.

If you can get through the first few games with some good results, getting points on the board and then adding some quality, then they should be in a good place.