Marcus Braddock takes a look at all things Shrewsbury Town
The main news from Shrewsbury Town last week was the home game against Portsmouth. Pompey have been in good form for much of the season so if I'm honest, I wasn't expecting us to get much.
I was pleasantly surprised to see us look the better team for the majority of the first half. I'm a little biased but I felt we had the better chances of the half and more of them but when you're on a run of good form things often seem to fall your way. A fair few of our goals seem to have come from an attack that we'd initially survived with players following in doing the damage with a ball that hadn't quite been cleared.
The second goal was very hard to take. Steve Arnold has made some excellent saves and kept us in important games this season but these things tend to happen when you're skulking around the lower reaches of the league table.
We'd been looking in decent enough shape up until then but at two goals down in the latter stages, a comeback was unlikely. Our performance was much better than against Wycombe but we won that one and lost this and I felt more optimistic on the walk back to the car than last week.
The Pompey game was used as an opportunity to highlight the work of Shrewsbury Town in the Community and the Armed forces. The event saw a multitude of activities from a sponsored walk to a walking football tournament. The tournament was won by a team from Newtown F.C. and included a team from Portsmouth.
Next week sees the long journey to the Essex coast to play Southend United. Their home form has been a little shaky all season with eleven defeats at Roots Hall. Their last home win was on January 1st against Gillingham and their last win of any kind was a 4-0 win away at Bradford City. Hopefully we can get a useful point or two and I'm sure Southend fans will be looking at our away form and thinking something similar.
There was good news in the middle of last week as a the youth team beat Telford on penalties to win the Shropshire Senior Cup. Archie Elmore scored in the 10th minute for Town but Telford equalized 15 minutes later and the game went to penalties which Town won after Cameron Gregory saved twice. The coming week sees the under 18 team take on Rochdale tomorrow and Accrington on Saturday morning.
Shrewsbury Town in the Community had a busy week last week with the EFL Day of Action when they showed some of the excellent work they do on a daily basis. There certainly is a lot of very good things being done by the STITC and so much of it for the wider community, giving people the opportunity to engage with the club in a variety of ways. I have personal experience from the NCS course that they run every year for a huge amount of young people in the area. It kept my daughter busy for four weeks last summer and she still keeps in touch with friends that she made. And that's just one of their activities from one of the most vibrant areas of our football club.