Sam Ricketts ready to get Shrewsbury Town working in training
Sam Ricketts is relishing a ‘vital’ week of training to help maintain and improve Shrewsbury performances.
The Town boss was impressed with his side’s display as they were the better team in Saturday’s 0-0 draw at Blackpool, particularly in the first period.
Shrewsbury looked settled in a new-look 3-4-3 formation that carried on from last Tuesday’s memorable night in Stoke.
Ricketts has overseen an intense December and January period as Town boss, with little opportunity to get his players on the Sundorne Castle training pitch – which he believes will be critical in installing more of his methods to the squad.
The Town chief, whose side will gear up for the huge FA Cup fourth round clash against Wolves on Saturday, said: “I’m more pleased on having an actual week to train with the players, getting to work on what we want to work on and be better at, what we want to maintain and improve so we can maintain the level of performances we have done like on Saturday and the second half last Tuesday.
“We have to maintain that as best we can and everything else will take care of itself.”
Town’s draw at Bloomfield Road was their fourth in eight League One games under Ricketts and 10th in the division this season – only Sunderland, with 11, have tied more often.
Ricketts confessed, not for the first time, that his side’s final action – where they were so ruthless at Stoke in the Cup – let them down at the Seasiders.
But he firmly believes training time will help carve one point in three, thus boosting Town’s bid to climb away from the bottom four, where the gap was cut to just a point over the weekend.
“The biggest thing is getting a week’s training so I can train the players and trying improve our performances to turn draws like this into wins,” Ricketts added.
“But this has to be the basis of being solid, hard to beat, hard to break down. It’s just the last little bit of action. At Stoke we managed to score three from the same action.
“I’ve had two free weeks before now. It’s nice actually, to get some training time with the players, it’s vital to try to instil your beliefs into the team.”
