Shrewsbury Town are capable of a second-half-of-the-season surge to surpass last campaign’s charge to Wembley, according to manager Gary Peters.Town produced a 14-match unbeaten run after Boxing Day last season as they rose from 16th in the table to within 90 minutes of playing League One football.

Despite a desperately disappointing season to date, Peters retains the belief that his players can find their form between now and the end of the season.

“The regular format since I have been at the club is that we have got better in the second half of the season,” said the Town boss.

“We have brought seven or eight players in each summer and we do a lot of work on the training ground which enables the young players to make better decisions.

“Last season I didn’t feel we were under-achieving in the first half of the season but this season I think we are.

“Because of that, we could see an even more dramatic improvement in the second half than we did last season.

“The players are good enough, they are just not playing well enough at the moment.

“But they are definitely better than the players we have had in the past because there are certain things we can do in training to measure that.

“We are putting on sessions now that we found hard to do two years ago and it’s a doddle.”

Town, who host Dagenham & Redbridge on Saturday, find themselves 11 points adrift of the automatic promotion places they were expected to challenge for at the start of the season.

But Peters insisted: “Anything’s possible because there are still 81 points to play for.

“Bristol Rovers were 17th with about a month of the season to play and got promoted, Hartlepool were probably no higher than us at this stage last season and went up automatically and Torquay were probably higher than us at this time and went down.”