Shrewsbury v Peterborough - Match preview

It begins a run of four fixtures in 10 days over the festive and new year period before the giant FA Cup showdown with rivals Wrexham comes on the horizon. Town’s run of games over Christmas sees local trips to Cheltenham on Boxing Day and Burton three days later, before the visit of Fleetwood on New Year’s Day. All three are currently 19th or below in the table.

But first it’s Darren Ferguson’s Posh to visit Shropshire in another testing clash for Taylor’s troops, who sit 13th. Ferguson has spoken this week of how Shrewsbury’s low goal tally (13 in 22 games) and league position has left him somewhat perplexed. Home boss Taylor, meanwhile, wants to see his side more difficult to break down – a quality he believes has served Shrewsbury well this term, but evaded them as Pompey netted three unanswered goals last time out.

“They’re a really good team with a load of pace, power, athleticism, energy and youth in their team, coupled with some experience,” Taylor said of tomorrow’s visitors.

“They have a group of players that look hungry, as if they’ve got that real desire to be successful.

“Their Championship season obviously wasn’t great but they’ve put together a team where you’re now seeing just how good they can be in an attacking sense.

“Saying that, every team at this level has areas we feel we can exploit, but first we have to not concede soft goals – and I just felt the goals we conceded against Portsmouth were soft.”

Five teams have shipped more than Town’s 30 goals so far this term, but the head coach wants his side to be tighter against Posh, who have lost just once in the league in 15 games, back to early September.

“Every goal is avoidable, there’s no issue with that,” Taylor added. “But where we’ve been good this season is we’ve been resolute for long periods of games. We’re going to have to do that again tomorrow.

“Then when we get in those goalscoring positions we’ve got to be ruthless, got to take those chances because against the good teams in the league you might only get one, two or three if you’re lucky, good moments or chances.

“The challenge is when they arrive we have to take them, whether it be a wing-back, midfielder, centre- forward.”

The head coach is hopeful of having the experience and versatility of Elliott Bennett to call on against Posh after missing out against Portsmouth with a knock. He is unlikely to start.

Town continue to be down to the bare bones with no other injury absentees ready to return to the fold imminently, ahead of games arriving thick and fast.Taylor admitted the next fortnight is going to be about injury prevention and training will be at a minimum as players are “wrapped in cotton wool”.

“We’ve got a lot of football and games to play between now and the new year, it feels like the period we went through earlier in the year where we won’t be training anywhere near as much,” added the boss.

“We’ll be spending a lot of time prepping, the odd training session here and there, but I know what thing, it’s definitely going to put the squad to its maximum test again. As we know we still have far too many injuries, so the challenge during this period is probably going to be wrapping the players up in cotton wool between games because we don’t have any players coming back in imminently. It’s going to be a test, whether or not each player can handle every game in a short space of time I don’t know.

“We’ll have to look at changes within the period facing us now, but the players always give everything. We’d love to have two or three more bodies but it doesn’t look that way. We’ll continue what we’ve done in the last four to five week and give everything we can for every game.”