I wouldn't accuse any of our squad of not trying. We were bullied a bit, but that doesn't mean they wanted it more. It means there is a fundamental weakness in the team/squad that needs to be addressed for next season.
I think this and that the ref offered our players very little protection in the first half on Sunday.
Nolan should have had at least one yellow, then you had the Morris elbow and numerous other incidents of over physicality that Shrewsbury dished out. For me the ref bottled a lot of decisions on Sunday.
Shrewsbury were well organised, broke with pace and deserved their win.
The problem for the ref is that a lot of Shrewsbury's challenges were borderline fouls. A completely differnet level, but the Arsenal team with Petite and Viera were masters of this a few years back although their fouls were slightly different in nature, they didn't allow opponents time to settle in midfield. It knocks teams off their stride. The ref gave quite a few as fouls and played a straight bat - but was slow to take action in relation to repeated fouling. I would say from my own observations, about 90% of refs at our level would ref the game in a similar way and we have to adapt accordingly rather than moan about it.
This type of fouling has to be done as a team. If it's shared around then nobody will get booked early for constant offending,
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