00:00Hello, Salop fans. Welcome to shopstar.com. My name is Jonny Drury. I'm here with Salop
00:13correspondent Oli Westbury for a Shrewsbury Town update, and it's safe to say a lot has
00:18been going on in the last few days at the Crowd Meadow and not, well, most of it, not
00:24great. Players departing, you know, rumours of other players departing, and then on Tuesday,
00:32the severe blow that the sort of startlet in the Shrewsbury side, Tom Bloxham, has been sold to
00:38Blackpool. Oli, it's difficult to kind of surmise everything because it seems to be getting
00:46almost kind of worse and worse by the days of the transfer window, and Shrewsbury has now lost
00:51their kind of star forward to another League One club. A bitter blow in the middle of a,
01:01you know, in the middle of a relegation battle. You never want to lose your best players, but to
01:05kind of sell Bloxham to Blackpool in the midst of a relegation dogfight, it's just a huge blow.
01:13You can see why Salop fans are obviously angry about this, and you can kind of understand why.
01:19Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been a fairly deflating 24 hours, to be completely honest with you.
01:26Obviously, we've got the story on Monday night about, you know, there being some serious
01:30interest in Tom Bloxham from Blackpool. And, you know, within 24 hours of that story going, he'd
01:39gone. Gutted personally, because, you know, he was one of the players that kind of got you off
01:47your seat. He was one of the players that you really felt like could make something happen for
01:51Shrewsbury. So he is somebody who's going to be missed, you know, quite severely. And just like
01:59you say there, like, you know, they're in the midst of a relegation dogfight, you know, and it's
02:06felt like over the last month to six weeks that things have finally started to almost pick up.
02:12Gareth Ainsworth's come in, you know, he's managed to shore it up defensively. He's been
02:19getting the best out of Tom Bloxham. Obviously, he scored that goal at Blackpool on New Year's
02:23Day to get him a point. He inspired the comeback at Wigan, you know, when they came back to get
02:28a 2-2 draw. And now he's departed. And along with all the other outgoings, it just feels like,
02:38well, it just feels like a borderline inevitability now that Shrewsbury
02:45are just going to struggle now for the remainder of this season. I mean, you know,
02:48they're losing players, you know, at will. And I know that a lot of them, it's probably their
02:53decisions too, but at the moment they've not managed to bring anybody in and, you know,
02:57they're only getting weaker. And Shrewsbury and Tom Bloxham is, you know, the kind of player who
03:05you need, you know, he's a threat and it's a real blow for Shrewsbury fans. You can 100%
03:15understand the frustration that the fans are showing right now. They must be absolutely gutted
03:21that, you know, it feels like Tom Bloxham has been around for a good period of time. He's been
03:28around ever since I've covered Shrewsbury, which is, you know, well into the third season here,
03:32and he's always been around. But, you know, the last month or so has been the best we've
03:36seen from Tom Bloxham. You know, he's been a real, real threat and for him to go now,
03:41it's just a real crippling, devastating blow and a huge blow for Shrewsbury's chances of
03:47survival this season. Yeah, it's always that danger, isn't it, when a player hits form,
03:51you know, a young player hits form, that a club's going to come in and, you know,
03:55the other side of it is it's a fantastic move for him, but it does leave Shrewsbury weaker.
03:59You never want to go into a trance window in a relegation battle and come out of it weaker. But
04:04a couple of players of low knees have gone back. Obviously, Jordan Rossett has gone
04:09on loan to National League side. Now Bloxham's gone. You know, talk of potentially earlier this
04:15week, we saw that Kyle Winchester could be heading for the Salop exit door. You know,
04:19there's been real questions around Salop's kind of recruitment team over the last couple of years,
04:24but they've got a massive month. Something's got to happen because you look at the number
04:29in Shrewsbury's squad, you know, I can't recall off the top of my head how many substitutes,
04:34and they're not a bench for an AFL game, but I'm sure they've got a score on the back of 69.
04:39Yeah, it's seven. No, well, yeah, yeah. The squad has taken a huge hit. You know,
04:51what would be really interesting is to get, you know, I mean, we speak to Gareth Hainsworth
04:55regularly and he's a pleasure to speak to. He's really positive, you know, full of enthusiasm and
04:59full of, you know, regardless of what's happening, I'd still expect him to be that. But I would pay
05:04a lot of money to actually have 10 minutes with Gareth Hainsworth where he would tell me what
05:08he actually thinks because I'd be very interested to know how he views kind of the situation of
05:15Shrewsbury selling the star asset, the star player, you know, in this transfer window.
05:21So, yeah, I mean, and I think what makes it even worse is it's all with the massive huge
05:28game against horizon, against Wrexham on the horizon. I mean, it's a massive game for the
05:33town fans. It's huge. You know, the importance of getting a result in that game is monumental. So,
05:40for Shrewsbury to kind of, you know, in the space of a week to get considerably weaker
05:47before that game, it just kind of, I mean, it beggars belief to be perfectly honest with you,
05:53Johnny. It's been a really challenging period. Obviously, you can see how angry and upset and
05:58emotional that the supporters are. And, you know, it just, it's such a shame because just as things,
06:05you felt like Gareth Hainsworth was picking them up, you know, there was starting to be some
06:09optimism, even if, you know, the end result would probably have still been that, you know,
06:14that survival would be a long shot. There was some optimism, but that feels like it's slowly
06:19ebbed away with like the constant kind of almost, you know, players leaving and we're not seeing
06:25anybody come in. And I know it's hard to bring players in in January, but at the moment,
06:30Shrewsbury, they're getting worse, not better. Yeah, they certainly are on the blocks and think
06:35it's just the timing, isn't it? You know, it's always undisclosed fee. So we kind of
06:41officially don't know how much that fee will be, but is there an argument for, you know,
06:47maybe not allowing it to happen in this window, but if he goes and has, you know, a good three or
06:52four months end in the season, helps Salop stay in the division, you know, you probably can command
06:57an even bigger fee in the summer. Yeah, I mean, that feels like what probably would have been the
07:02best, well, what could have been a better option. Obviously, Tom Blotson expressed an interest that
07:08I imagine that the financial kind of repercussions for Tom to leave were, you know,
07:13very enticing for him to want to get a blackboard. If you were Shrewsbury, you would have thought,
07:17you say to Tom, try and keep us up, try and help us stay in league one this season in the summer,
07:21we'll let you go. We'll activate your extension and then we'll let you go. And that's obviously
07:28not the case. That's not happened. And obviously he's gone now. And, you know, I don't know how
07:35Shrewsbury are going to, you know, try and replace a player with the raw ability of Tom Blotson
07:42with, you know, what money that they've got to spend. So, you know, there's not, I mean,
07:51there's just not a great deal of positive vibes that you can bring to this conversation,
07:57to be honest, Johnny. I think everybody just feels flat. Yeah, they certainly do feel the
08:04face. Just finally, you know, I think it's 17 senior players kind of left at the club at the
08:09moment. We knew they needed reinforcements. We know Gareth Ainsworth wants to bring in
08:15reinforcements, but given what's happened in the last kind of seven to 10 days, or even the last
08:2024 hours, they need a considerable number of additions, Oli, because you're in a position
08:27now where you've got 17 senior players. If no one else is coming in, if you pick up injuries,
08:32you know, you're in a situation that doesn't even kind of bear thinking about from Blotson's
08:37point of view. I think that is the one thing that feels as though everybody is forgetting,
08:42is that, well, not forgetting, but it's so worth pointing out, is that Shrewsbury have
08:46got now a limited number of players in their squad, probably just about enough to fill a bench,
08:52you know, for the game against Wrexham, given how many players that they've kind of left,
08:55but they haven't got a single injury in the squad at the moment. Everybody's fit,
08:59you know, so it beggars belief, really. Like, you would normally expect, it's probably reasonable
09:06to expect there to be two or three players at a time to be injured. You know, if Shrewsbury
09:10get some bad luck with injuries, you know, they're going to be, it just doesn't even
09:15bear thinking about, John. It just doesn't even bear thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah. It's just,
09:21I suppose the difficulty is, is that, you know, if they want to decide that they're going to send
09:25loan players back, then of course there, I think there's agreements that, you know,
09:30it happens over certain times, you know, so you can understand, you can understand how
09:38they have to send them back at a certain period, because that's what's in the loan agreements,
09:42you know, to be able to send them back at a certain time of the month. So for example,
09:46if they, I mean, I don't know this for sure, but if Josh Coyote, if they wanted to send him back,
09:51they might've had to have sent, made the decision before, like say the 14th of January. So they
09:57can't afford to sit and wait on it until the end of the month, because then they simply won't,
10:01you know, they won't be able to send him back at that point. So that does force their hand a
10:05little bit, but yeah, it feels, but they didn't have to sell Tom Bloxham. That was a choice.
10:10They made the choice to sell Tom Bloxham and, and, and, and, and, you know, that feels like
10:15on the eve of a massive, huge cross-border Derby, like the wrong call.
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