David Longwell reflects on Town's 3-1 Academy win over Rochdale.
Shrewsbury Town’s under 18’s continued their impressive start to the season last weekend with a 3-1 away win over Rochdale.
Liam Thomas, Ben Crompton and Jenson Cooper were the trio on hand to notch the goals for Salop.
Academy Manager David Longwell was pleased with the result and was encouraged by the young Shrews’ performance.
On the result:
“We had a really good start to the game with Liam Thomas scoring after 17 seconds. It was probably the best goal we’ve had this season.
“The game got moved due to the weather so we played on a 3G surface which was ok. If you look at the full game, we deserved to win. Rochdale are well known for wanting to play good football. We had a game plan to stop that. We created a lot of chances and managed to go two up. Ben Crompton got the second from outside the box. It was a good bit of play from our point of view.
“The second-half, we were a little bit wasteful with some of our chances. We lost a poor goal to go 2-1 but fortunately, Jensen Cooper came on and scored with his first touch.”
On the performance:
“I think the performance was ok. We gave the ball away a little bit too much. Our pressure was good as always because the lads work hard. The fact we created a lot of chances again was great.
“The only disappointing thing in some of our games is that we should score more goals. We are very attack-minded and always create opportunities. We want to make sure we can take more of them. Some games you don’t get those opportunities so we need to be more clinical.
“We work really hard in training on attacking movement. We split the groups and do a lot of work in units. A lot of that is now coming to fruition in games and we can see that.”
On Notts County cup fixture:
“That game is now done and we move onto Notts County in the League Cup. We want to keep that momentum going and keep performances improving. We are pleased with the results and chance creation but we want to keep improving the whole performance.
“Our preparations for these games is quite similar to normal. We try to do a lot of work on ourselves. We teach them the things that it takes to play at first-team level.
“We will do some analysis of Notts County this week and work on things in training. We like to give them a lot of detail and a game plan every week."