Aaron Wilbraham: Steve Cotterill ‘cares too much’ to stop
Stand-in manager Aaron Wilbraham says absent boss Steve Cotterill cares too much about Shrewsbury Town to ‘leave them to it’ without him.
Cotterill has spent a month in hospital fighting coronavirus and Wilbraham revealed the manager was this week placed on a high dosage steroid drip to aid his recovery.
Tomorrow’s League One visit of Ipswich to Montgomery Waters Meadow will be the seventh fixture Town have played without their boss. But Cotterill remains influential with the detail he provides for training and opposition from hospital.
“The manager knows his own body, he’s been a footballer and had operations,” Wilbraham said of Cotterill’s workload.
“Even if you told him to rest, he cares too much, to be honest – about the football club and the team – to just leave us to it, he wouldn’t to it even if he was told to.
“But he knows he needs to get his health right and he won’t be doing anything to risk that, but obviously he is doing a lot of work from hospital bed.”
Cotterill is reluctant to put a timeframe on returning to his Bristol family home but there is hope, if the treatment is successful, he could be released next week.
“No-one really knows enough about the Covid, and because it affects everyone differently,” Town’s assistant added.
“The manager’s had a few setbacks like this, he’s not wanting to think he will be coming home this week, in case he doesn’t.
“He’s on this high dosage steroid intravenously over a drip for three days, Tuesday to Thursday, hopefully it clears the lung area which Covid affects and that’ll give him the boost he needs.
“The nurses and doctors say that has worked and they’ve had good results with patients, they are quite confident that hopefully next week he can finally get home, because his family is missing him as well.”
