After suffering their first league defeat of the season to Morecambe, what a way for Town to hit back by scoring seven goals against Gillingham, writes our Shrews blogger James Pugh.

It was a lacklustre performance against Morecambe, made worse by the fact we were playing against our “rejects” in Artell and Drummond – although I must say I was disappointed to see Drummond go and do not think his “replacement” McIntyre is much better.

After the game Simpson said the result would hopefully give the players a wake-up call to make them realise they cannot take any team in this division for granted – and it certainly did.

Town scoring seven goals in a game is almost unheard of and it could have been more.

There were plenty of positives to take from the game and one of them for me is that we had six different goalscorers. A promotion-hunting team cannot rely on a couple of players to get them goals because everyone goes through a bad patch of form, and the fact that goals are coming from players all over the field bodes well for the rest of the season.

Let us hope that this result wasn’t a fluke and if we show this form from now until the end of the season, promotion should be a forgone conclusion.

We are starting to make the Prostar Stadium a fortress, which it wasn’t last season and now what we have to do is take this form away from home with us and to be more positive.

I thought Sean Thornton did a very good job on his debut and was very pleased when I heard Simpson had brought in another midfielder, which is where I thought we were lacking.

I remember his days when he was playing for Sunderland in a higher league, and although his career has not gone the way I thought it might, you can see he still possesses quality and will be a very good acquisition for us.

On the other hand, I was disappointed to see Mark Pugh go out on loan. Although it will do him good to be playing games, I still think he has a future at the club and has that ability to go past players which I think is vital for strikers like Holt, Walker and Hibbert to thrive upon. Let us hope he goes away, performs well week in week out for Luton and comes back doing the same for the Town.

Meanwhile, Town didn’t really get the tie they hoped for in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy – fans are going to have to travel on the road again, this time to Wycombe. A home tie would have been nice, but if we are to reach the final then we should expect to play some tough matches.

Wycombe away is definitely a winnable game and a trip to MK Dons would have been a lot tougher.