Sam Ricketts: Shrewsbury will bring joy on return

The Shrewsbury manager wants to provide supporters with a ‘front foot and high energy style’ to help them return to normal life after the coronavirus lockdown.

Town struggled for goals in the first half of the current campaign as Ricketts focused on setting up a side difficult to create chances and score goals against.

But, having switched his formation to find a role for more attack-minded players shortly before football was suspended indefinitely, Ricketts is keen for an entertaining theme to prevail.

“The slight change we made to the system certainly made a difference,” said Town boss Ricketts, whose side scored 31 goals from 34 games this season.

“Now it’s trying to concentrate on that and to get as good on that as we possibly can and do a lot of work within that.

“Obviously it’s not within the players at the moment, but putting a lot of presentations together and clips of us or other teams doing it to try to get as good as we can.

“It takes six to 12 months to really know a system. We’ve been doing three at the back, 3-4-3, 3-5-2, 5-4-1 and we know that system, we know it can work really well in certain games and it’s proved.

“But we also want to be more front foot, to score more goals.”

Ricketts, whose players are completing their own fitness programmes in lockdown, will provide information on how he wants his side to play as they prepare to return to training, which is pencilled in for May 16.

“Coming out of this situation we’re in now I want the supporters to come and see an exciting team to watch, on the front foot, high energy, full of endeavour and goals,” the Welshman added.