Micky talks trialist games and planning for the season
Shrewsbury Town played host to a football match with a twist last week – as 22 triallists went head to head on the Greenhous Meadow training pitch.The club organised the game between a number of players who had been brought to the attention of club by agents and scouts in order to have a look at them in a game situation.
And Micky Mellon said they invited other clubs to come along and have a look too, knowing that Town would not be able to take them all on.
“We have got Adam on board in recruitment now. One of the things I said to them was that I keep getting all these names of lads that can’t get clubs or agents trying to get them opportunities to get clubs so I said to them why don’t you set up a game?” he told ShrewsWeb.
“Him and Michael Vernon managed to put an eleven against eleven game on with all these triallists in it on the training pitch which I don’t think is something we have done here before. It was done by somebody else before but I wanted to try it here.
“Instead of saying to agents we will get to see them or we will try and see some footage of them we were able to do that and see them here in the flesh in an eleven v eleven.
“I knew that we weren’t going to be able to take them all so we did a decent thing on behalf of the club and invited other local clubs to come and have a look as well.
“The likes of Chester, Morecambe, Accrington, Tranmere, Wrexham, we invited Telford, TNS all to come and have a look as well because all these lads are available.
“The thing is we are all football men and you want them to have the best opportunity to get some work.
“We have had a number of phone calls about a good percentage of the players and we are still considering one or two ourselves so it has been a really worthwhile exercise for us and it was very well organised by Adam and Michael.
“It was flawless and everybody is very grateful that we did it. It was another recruitment avenue we want to go down to keep moving this team forward.
“Recruitment is really important to the club so any information that we get in, Adam is able to put it together and take the phone calls from scouts and keep it all organised. We are very busy doing that.”
Micky also revealed that he had a meeting with all the scouts who had worked for the club last season to thank them for their work and map out their workload for the coming season.
“We have covered most of the country and Scotland and even big parts of Europe now,” Micky said.
“We have a lot of games covered. When we identify targets or hear about people doing well we get people to go and watch them a number of times.
“We have the whole of the country covered so I got all the scouts together who worked for us last season and helped us to put together this group to say thank-you and show them how their work has helped us and where the information they send in goes and how we use it to our advantage.
“We ask them how we could improve it and tell them some of our ideas on how we want to improve it and away we go again for another season.
“It is important to let them know they are a big part of what we do. It is such a bit operation now.
“Since we came in it has moved on unrecognisably. It just goes to show if you get the right people in the right places how far you can go.
“It is great to get the guys down and show our appreciation to them.”
Micky also said that work is going on in other parts of the football club to improve them with the ultimate aim of making the first team better.
“We are continually prodding at everything we do to try and improve the product we are putting out there on the pitch. We don’t rest for a minute,” he said.
“We keep working hard and we are going to keep trying to improve the infrastructure of the football club from top to bottom from the first team to the community work, from recruitment to centre of excellence.”
Article Copyright © 2016. Permission to use quotations from this article is only granted subject to appropriate source credit and hyperlink to www.shrewsburytown.com