Paul Cook admits he did not enjoy watching Ipswich in win over Shrewsbury

Posted Sunday, October 10, 2021 by PA

Ipswich boss Paul Cook admitted he did not enjoy watching his team in their 2-1 home win over Shrewsbury at Portman Road.

Conor Chaplin gave the Blues a 23rd-minute lead before Shaun Whalley stunned the home crowd into silence with a superb long-range effort five minutes later.

Top scorer Macauley Bonne sealed the points for the Tractor Boys after the break with an expert near-post header from Lee Evans’ corner.

Cook said: “For 23 minutes, it was probably as good as I’ve seen us play this year. Everything about us looked good, we scored and then I don’t know what goes through their minds for the next 10 minutes.

“We speak about scoring and the importance of scoring again, playing in their half, being aggressive, getting second balls and there’s just a sloppiness around us that comes into the team.

“Great credit to the players, we’ve won, we’ve dug a result out, our fans leave the stadium elated – and I can’t thank them enough, the support is unreal, the stadium’s rocking.

“But as a manager, I want to enjoy watching our team play and today I’m back to not enjoying it.”

Asked what the sloppiness was down to, Cook added: “It’s mentality. 100 per cent it’s mentality. You can’t be good and then just decide to say ‘well ok, we’re doing great in the game, let’s go and not be as good’.

“We got a really nice group of lads, trust me there’s some really good lads in there, good players but at the moment our mentality to be a good team is not quite there yet. That’s something we’re going to work really hard on.”

Shrewsbury manager Steve Cotterill felt his team did not get the rub of the green during the game.

He said: “We’re disappointed with their goals, we’re disappointed with a few decisions today. We think we should have had a penalty, we don’t think their goal from a corner is a corner.

“Elliott Bennett can keep that in play, the reason he’s let it go out is because their lad’s kicked it.

“We know we’ve got to defend the corner better, we just spoke about that. I think late on there’s a penalty on Luke Leahy. Why would he go down? He’s in an area where he could shoot. We felt a little hard done by today.

“There isn’t a lot we’ve done wrong today. There’s a couple of decisions that have swung against us so it’s very difficult to be hard on them when you look at those decisions.”

Cotterill also revealed that striker Ryan Bowman had been forced off in the first-half after having heart palpitations.

He added: “He had heart palpitations and the doctor said his heart was beating at 250bpm or something. So we just hope when we go back in, we get more of an update.”