Shrewsbury Town

Academy Coach reacts to the draw with Vale

Shrewsbury Town Academy Coach Ben King was pleased with how Town’s Under-18’s adapted to a new style of play as they drew 1-1 with Port Vale.

The Town youngsters had been working hard in training last week and King was pleased with the sides’ performance.

“It was a good performance overall”, Ben told ShrewsWeb.

“I think we are quite happy with how the lads played. We’ve worked on some new concepts in training during the week and it’s taken some time for them to understand that, but they’ve done really well to have just a couple of training sessions and then put those into the game.

“We’ve worked on a lot of crossing and finishing in training combined with the movements of the two central midfield players and George Hassell’s done extremely well to score those types of goals.

“We had a couple of opportunities in the second half with some crosses and there’s one really late in the game where the ball’s been sent through and it just hasn’t had that quality on the finish which is unfortunate.

“But, the good thing is we are creating those chances and on another day we would have scored those goals.

“It’s been a bit of a changed week for the players. We’ve worked on a few new things today which means that they probably have switched off in a couple of areas to allow the goal to happen, but we will cut them some slack there.

“Hopefully going into next week and the week afterwards we will be able to shore up our set pieces defensively and hopefully start looking offensively at our set pieces.”