Shrewsbury Town

Shrewsbury Town’s new look squad returns to pre-season training today and manager Micky Mellon is eager to hit the ground running.

The gaffer has brought in seven new faces since the end of last season, with Jayson Leutwiler, Callum Burton and Junior Brown all extending their stay in Shropshire.

And after learning they would start the new campaign at home to MK Dons, Mellon can’t wait to get back on the training ground and getting the hard work started.

“The preparation has all been done now so it will be good to get the lads back in the building and start getting that fitness work done. It has quickly come around again,” he told ShrewsWeb.

“It is nice to get everybody in and get things organised and get going. The last week or 10 days has been a lot of waiting around and a lot of fine tuning and organising but we will be ready to go.

“The staff have been great during the close season to make sure we are good to go and we will get cracking with the work that needs to get done.

“It may be a bit early for the balls but they will be out at some stage. We always like to try and do that but today will be more about trying to get fitness levels compared to last season for the lads that have stayed with us and quickly get to know the levels of the lads that we have brought in with the fitness tests we have done for a few years now.

“We will get to know where we are all at as a group and we will continually measure that to see where we need to improve to try and have a successful season.”

Training sessions have been planned and practice games organised to ensure the side are raring to go come August.

“The first couple of weeks they will be training three times a day – not to beast them but to quickly try to get them to where we want them to be when the games begin,” added Mellon.

“We have got Wolves behind closed doors so we want to try and be sure by the time that game comes around we are at a certain level and getting close to the levels we want to be by the first game of the season.

“It is a long layoff without kicking a football. We can practice a few things and try and get them into some kind of form as quickly as possible.”

Olly Lancashire, Ryan McGivern, Antoni Sarcevic, Gary Deegan, Louis Dodds, Jim O’Brien and AJ Leitch-Smith have all joined Town over the summer and Mellon can’t wait to get working with his League One ready squad.

But he also revealed that there could be more changes to his group of players by the time the action kicks off as he looks to improve on last season.

“It was important we tried to get lads in who we knew what they had done at this level,” he said.

“We still believe they can improve as well and added to the lads that have remained with us from last season we want to make sure we are a stronger outfit this season.

“There is still a bit of wheeling and dealing that needs to be done in order to try and do a few more bits that we want to get done but we are in a good place at the minute and we will continue to try and improve that group.

“We want to improve on everything. We want to continue improving but without getting carried away.

“We don’t know how well we are going to do but we expect and believe that we have got a strong group that can build on what last season’s group achieved.

“I am not going to set targets about what we dream of doing because right now it is about getting the fitness levels up to speed and then getting ready for the first game.”