FAN’S VIEW 22/23 – No.19: SHREWSBURY AWAY

Our opponents

It’s easy to forget that Shrewsbury spent a season in the Conference back in 2003-04 but didn’t hang about in winning promotion back at the first time of asking. They beat Aldershot in the play-off final on penalties at the Millennium Stadium.

They’ve put that minor aberration well behind them with this being their eighth consecutive season in League One. Save for one season they’ve hardly set this division alight. They’ve finished 20^th, 18^th three times, 17^th and 15^th with the standout season being 2017/18. They made it to the play-off final only losing to Rotherham 2-1.

Their current league form doesn’t look good, one point from three games; however closer inspection is merited. In their last match, like us, they drew 1-1 at Pompey. They only lost 2-1 at Plymouth who are yet to drop a point at Home Park and the other game was a 1-0 home defeat against Charlton.

They’ve currently got three more points than us having played the same number of games.

The Shrews latest accounts are to year ending 30 June 2021. They’re full accounts.

They reported “a second successive loss of over £1.4m in the year to 30 June 2021, on top of the previous year’s £723k loss, reflecting the massive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic”.

Match day revenue was reduced by over £1.3m and “conference & events income which is a vital revenue stream that we rely on for 365 days per year also was non-existent”. Yet another reminder where we lose out whilst trapped at the Kassam.

They were “helped somewhat by a ‘COVID-19 bailout’ from the Premier League, which assisted to the tune of £442k which equated to less than one and a half months salaries unlike some League One Clubs who received in excess of £1m extra funding”.  I don’t know what the formula for distribution of the bailout funds was but clearly the Salopians are not overly happy with their gift. I’d be interested to know what we got but as our accounts are of the limited variety, have no idea. As fans and shareholders we’re just not informed of these things. I raised it at the AGM and Niall McWilliams agreed that communication is important. It certainly is but will anything change?

Their salaries, wages, social security and pension costs came to £4.1m which is on the rather low side for L1 so their league position over the years is really to be expected. They’re clearly living within their means but could probably push the boat out a bit more with £15m worth of net assets shown on the balance sheet.

Their average home league attendance is 6,201 making them 16^th highest in the division which, considering they’re just about always fighting relegation, isn’t bad. We’re only 14^th highest on 7,748. Big club? Possibly not for L1 but it’s not as if we’ve been playing football to entice wavering supporters to a soulless stadium. There are actually three clubs in L2 with bigger attendances than ours. Bradford, with massive gates but their season tickets are dirt cheap. I think they work out to about eight quid a game. Stockport – yes, surprisingly, but they’re on the up after getting promotion last season. We have to watch out for clubs on the up. Upwardly mobile clubs will overtake a number of backward going and stagnant rivals before their momentum in turn stalls or goes into reverse. It feels like our gears are in reverse or at best neutral.

I’m not one to ignore facts. The third team in L2 who are getting more through the gates than us is Swindon Town. They’re getting about a thousand more. That hurts.

Shrewsbury Town FC are under the control of Roland Wycherley who owns over 50% of the issued shares. He’s been Chairman for 26 years and is now 81 years old. Last year there was talk of him stepping down but he’s still Chairman.

Shrewsbury Town 1 Oxford United 1

There will be the easily satisfied who will look on coming away from Shropshire with a point and extending our unbeaten away run in the league to four games as a job well done. Not me. The nature of how we got that point, the standard of the opposition and other factors have done nothing to boost my optimism that we’ll somehow turn this into a (half) decent season.

It’s obvious now that the squad / team we have this season is the worst we’ve had for years.

The entertainment we’re being served up is more often than not severely lacking and I think that is reflected in not only our home gates but the number that are travelling away. Just 341 in the away seats here. The total attendance of just 5,158 tells that this fixture had little appeal all round.

What did hit the mark was the pre-match beer in the Cross Foxes, a warm and welcoming pub which is always full of locals whatever time one visits. Beer quality can’t be faulted nor the prices and it is good to get local ale on our travels. This time from the Three Tuns brewery in Bishops Castle. And it’s always the same bloke behind the bar. For me this has overtaken the Prince of Wales (the pub that has some of the old Gay Meadow seats surrounding the bowling green out the back) as the must get to pub when we visit.

The pies served in the ground deserve a mention too. The best food I’ve had since Kidderminster back in the day. Not the biggest circumference but rather tall and full of meat, which is a rarity. I’ve never had a chicken balti pie that tasted better and all for just £3.50. Wright’s of Crewe take a bow.

I am going to start with this from the preview on the OUFC official site: “Sam Baldock, Josh Murphy, Yanic Wildschut and Oisin Smyth all remain missing through injury”. I’m going to keep coming back to it until us fans are told who made the decision to give the likes of Baldock and Murphy the contracts they have. Was it an individual or a collective decision? What risk assessment took place? Their injury prone records are there for all to see – and Wildschut’s too actually.

I honestly think heads should roll and if I was one of the owners I would be going ape-shit. The last time Baldock kicked a ball competitively for us was 5 March. Bad knee injury so we give him a two year deal. The season is now a third over.

I don’t blame any of these young men one bit – they need to make a living – but I think as fans we’re having the piss taken out of us. Still expected to pay full price (or a concession for us old gits) to watch a vastly inferior product to what some clubs are laying on as entertainment – Plymouth and Ipswich for example. If our salary budget had been spent wisely and with some thought we wouldn’t be where we are now and we would also have a much better balanced squad.

We’re not even told when these players are likely to be back now. There’s talk on the terraces that poor Sam B is finished. And there’s Alex Gorrin too. He had a terrible injury last season. Before he’d proven he was back to the level he’d previously been at we gave him a new contract. Now he can’t get in the team and in the few moments we’ve seen of him he looks off the pace compared to his old self.

This is all very sad but how many other clubs dish out contracts like we do to players who are not that likely to contribute much at all?

Then there’s players who are past their best. We gave a two year deal to James Henry in May when he was nearly 33.

The game started but we didn’t, although we weren’t in quite such a slumbersome mode as we had been against Fleetwood. That said, we still nearly went behind almost immediately, Marcus McGuane having been robbed of the ball.

Yea gods it was a mediocre first half and when I say mediocre I’m probably talking it up more than the game deserves. Two poor teams producing a poor advert for L1. Not long back I was raving about the quality in tier three.

We were hardly seeing a football match. Some games flow. Some are stilted to such an extent that stoppages outweigh all else. The latter applied here. In the first nine minutes referee Martin Woods stopped the game three times when home players didn’t get up after they’d challenged for the ball. I’ll admit to not knowing the detail of the instructions they are supposed to follow in these circumstances. A head injury, obvious or suspected, clearly blow the whistle. An obvious or suspected nasty injury to any other part of the body or a player just collapsing then another clear yes, blow that whistle and get them looked at in double quick time. It is a hard one for the officials but every time a player just stays down? No. I can’t see why the yellow shirted ones (we were in white) stayed down. They couldn’t have been time wasting that early on but after a tiny bit of treatment were up and running with no ill effects. It was so stop start anyway the game would soon have been halted for a free-kick or the ball being aimed out of play. The reason I’ve gone on at length about this is that in the same period Marcus Browne went down and stayed on the deck. Woods looked at him and let play go on. Browne then got up and on with the game.

Going a goal up with a quarter of an hour gone should have raised my spirits more than it did. Happy that we scored obviously but I didn’t leap about as I often do. It was fairly polite applause knowing full well that we had not started well nor do we keep clean sheets. We’ve conceded in every game on our travels and I knew full well if we were to win we’d need another.

The goal showed the way to win the game. Get the ball with decent or even half decent delivery into the box, play the percentage game and eventually the back of the net will be found. To be fair to us we did play some reasonable football in the build-up. The ball was moved quite quickly from Billy Bodin to Cameron Brannagan to Djavan Anderson who delivered a dangerous cross that had keeper Marko Marosi flying through the air to punch away. It went a reasonable distance but we were at last on the front foot with three Oxford players drawn to the ball. Brannagan took it on his knee then flipped it with the outside of his foot to McGuane who turned one way then the other before passing wide to Ciaron Brown. Another centre with some quality on it was bent in. The defensive header wasn’t able to get the ball very far and Brannagan acted quickest. He did well to keep his shot low and a big deflection did the rest.

The commentator on the available extended highlights had it right when he said “I have to say the away side have been playing second best so far in this one”.

So, keep getting good delivery into the box and goals will come. That applied to both sides.

At the final reckoning Shrewsbury had 53% possession but the most telling stat was the corner count. They had twelve. We didn’t force any. My mate commented that however good a team may be at defending them, if they concede them at the rate we do, one will eventually result in a goal. Pressure does tell. In the second half the Shrews had a spell of 15 to 20 minutes when they were well on top and indeed we were breached in the 65^th minute.

At no time during the game did we have a spell anything like that. A draw was possibly a fair result but on this basis if either of the two teams deserved to have won it was them and not us. We hardly put any proper moves together and our shooting was of its usual standard, not good enough.

Both teams had five shots on target, them from twelve efforts and us from eleven, but as ever the nature of those shots has to be taken into account. We had four from outside the box; they had none.

The standard of shooting is one of many football topics that get my goat and believe me there are loads of them. Before half time Browne had hit a wild shot over the bar. The commentator had it right: “not well executed”. It’s probably not fair of me to go on about it so often because there is quite a lot of shocking shooting in the Premier League too. As bad as that which we regularly witness.

I have to say though that MB showed that little bit extra class which the rest of our players lacked. He can go past opponents with ease and set things going but I think most are not on the same wavelength as him. What I liked about his performance as much as anything else was the effort he put in in the second half to run some considerable distance to close an opponent down when we were under threat. It should also be remembered that he’d taken quite a battering early on. He was brought down time and again. Whether the defender on each occasion deliberately tried to floor our man or it was just skill that gave that impression is for the referee to decide. I know which I thought it was. On the early evidence I had Shrewsbury down as a dirty side.

The challenge which saw Kyle Joseph stretchered off with a nasty looking injury was a hefty one but not done with any intention of injuring our loanee and possibly the yellow card was harsh. Obviously I feel for the lad and wish him all the very best in a quick and full recovery. He’ll be a big miss but to be honest he wasn’t having his best game here. What I can’t abide was the reaction of a fair number of Shrewsbury supporters. Clearly our man from Swansea was in considerable pain and there’s bound to be immediate thoughts of how long will I be out, where’s my career going? The classless scum booed him as he was carried away. I won’t forget that. They appalled me.

One yellow card I thought Woods got absolutely wrong was that which he showed to Elliott Moore. The ball was between our captain and a Shrewsbury man. Each played the ball facing each other and Moore won out being the stronger. Their man goes down and gets a free-kick. (I’ve not watched a replay to confirm but that’s how I saw it at the time).

If I had to give a man of the match award to an Oxford player it would be Simon Eastwood. As the high balls were coming in and the pressure was mounting he managed to get legs, arms and body in the way. The rest of the defence were doing a pretty good job of keeping the ball out of our net too with headers away (mostly Moore) and half desperate blocks but we knew we would eventually crack. One header from a corner in the first half had, for the opposition, gone agonisingly wide and that was a warning of what was to come.

We had many more such warnings but the crack duly appeared in the 65^th minute. A corner from the left wing was played beyond the far post. Brown got his head on it but, with the ball already having cleared the man he was marking, he would have been better to let it go out for a goal kick. All he did was give possession to the player who was able to knock it back into the six yard box. It took a deflection off Brannagan’s shoulder as he turned his back and sat up nicely for the unmarked Matthew Pennington to nod home.

We do have it in us not to crumble completely and although they looked more likely to get a second than us, we didn’t crack for a second time. So some credit for that.

Overall though not good enough to be considered anything other than (lower?) mid table at best and that’s probably pushing it.

There’s so much wrong which is repeated over and over. Here I’ll just stick to a couple of things.

We no longer have footballing centre-halves. I don’t think Moore is very good with his distribution and I can hardly recall Stuart Findlay making a pass. Neither are designed to bring the ball out. That has taken away so much of what was quite instrumental to the way we used to play. At the other end of the pitch Matty Taylor used to score goals but now he looks very much like a has been. Pains me to say that. Has he declined that much or is the service to him just abysmal?

I’m struggling to think of anything to convince me that Saturday will bring a good home performance at last and a clean sheet to go with three points. The evidence just hasn’t been there to support such optimism – and we’ll be without Brannagan, Joseph and Anderson along with all the other regulars who are nowhere near being in a fit state for the first team.