Marcus Braddock gives us his preview ahead of Oxford
It's preview time again and this weekend Shrewsbury Town head to the dreaming spires of Oxford to face United. A quick look at the U's form shows that they haven't had too bad a season with five wins so far in League One. However, a closer inspection shows that three of those wins were in cup competitions. Take the cup wins away and things look much grimmer for U's manager Karl Robinson and his players. Between the start of the season and early October, Oxford earned just five points from a win and three draws. That's relegation inducing form but the good news for U's fans is that recent form has picked up considerably with one win and three draws, boosting their total by six points to eleven.
Top Scorer
Goals have been a little hard to come by for Oxford with Ricky Holmes taking top spot after scoring three goals in League One and one from the FL trophy. The 31 year old is on loan from Sheffield United and has a bit of a history with Shrewsbury Town, scoring once against us as a Barnet player in 2011/12 and five times as a Charlton player in 2016/17!
Clean Sheets
Three from away games and one at home. The away clean sheets all came from 0-0 draws and three of their four clean sheets were gained from their last four league games.
Stats
Oxford's average points per home game is 0.86, the league average is 1.4.
The U's have lost 71% of their home games this season, more than double the League One average of 35%.
They've failed to score in one third of their 15 games this season.
So far this season Oxford have conceded an average of 3.14 goals per game at home.
Goals
Oxford have barely scored in the first half of games at home with just three all season. The second half is a different story with seven scored, three from the fifteen minutes after half time and two in the final 15 minutes of the game.
It's a similar story for goals conceded with just four scored against them in the first half so far. The second half has seen the U's concede eight times with four scored in the last fifteen minutes.
Referee
Martin Coy. Games this season:13. Yellow cards:30. Red cards:1.
Assistants: Lisa Rashid and Samuel Ogles.
Fourth official: Craig Taylor.
Squad News
Oxford forwards Shandon Baptiste,Jon Obika and Rob Hall are all out of action this weekend.
Shaun Whalley will miss out again because of a calf injury.
Summary
Oxford United celebrate their 125th year as a football club this weekend, so happy anniversary to them. Will the celebrations act as a catalyst for a home win? It might but their recent form suggests that they might not need it. Three clean sheets in from their last four league games with just 1 conceded in the remaining game. It's worrying form from our point of view but we had a great result on Tuesday which will do our confidence no harm. It's likely to be hard work against a team finding form but if we play as well as we did on Tuesday, there is a good chance of a point or more.