Steve Cotterill happy with Shrewsbury Town's early summer signs
Shrewsbury boss Steve Cotterill is pleased with the progress his side have made during their pre-season friendlies.
Town secured a creditable goalless draw against Championship visitors Cardiff, having previously given their best display across three warm-up games in the 3-1 defeat to relegated Premier League outfit Burnley last week.
Cotterill’s men started their friendly outings with a goalless draw at AFC Telford. They will not play another public warm-up fixture, but the manager said he is looking for a inter-squad training game behind closed doors either today or tomorrow.
“We’ve had a good few moments in the Burnley game and this (Cardiff) game,” said Cotterill. “We’re certainly further on then where we started against Telford only a week ago.
“We’ve had three games crammed into that week, which you don’t normally get in pre-season, but I wanted to put them under stress and duress.
“Normally you’ve got Tuesday-Saturday-Tuesday (Town played Friday night instead). They’ve had a real tough week. Not just those games, training on top of it, and they’ve trained really well like they always do.”
The manager expanded on aspects of his side’s play: “It wasn’t just the way they defended, you’ve got to do that, to have a base. If you haven’t got a base then we’ve got nothing to work off.
“There was other good bits of interchanging play, balls we’ve put across their box, certainly early on in the game with Julien Dacosta and Shippers (Jordan Shipley).
“It’s not just defending. We don’t really want to be like that. It’d be nice to be attacking all the time, but you can’t be, especially when you play games up a level like we have.”
