Mark Bonner left frustrated as Shrewsbury grab late leveller at Cambridge

Posted Sunday, October 15, 2023 by PA

Mark Bonner was disappointed to watch two points slip away after Shrewsbury scored a late leveller in a 1-1 draw at Cambridge.

The U’s had looked set to earn three points and end their five-match winless run in Sky Bet League One, but Taylor Perry netted two minutes from the end to secure Shrewsbury a point.

The match will be best remembered for Michael Morrison’s remarkable solo goal which had put Bonner’s side ahead 21 minutes from the end – he ran half the length of the field to score for Cambridge for the first time since January 2007.

“It’s the difference between 10th and 17th in the league, that,” Bonner said of Perry’s goal. “That’s how close the table is. Obviously it can change very quickly but that’s a big difference for us. We could have been looking at something very, very different.

“It’s not a great game by any stretch of the imagination and the goal we concede at the end is a moment we would defend a hundred times. It’s an easy moment to defend but we don’t defend it well enough. Then we get punished and we drop two points.

“If you look at the balance of the game, a draw’s probably the right result but when you’re 1-0 up with a few minutes to go you’ve got to get the maximum. So we’re kicking ourselves because the moment that we concede the goal is a really poor situation for us and we should take the points.

“At times today it was a bit too slow and we looked a little bit bruised by a couple of bad results recently. We’ve got to find that confidence to just go and play.”

Shrewsbury boss Matt Taylor was satisfied with his side’s response to falling behind and felt that a point was the least they deserved.

“I’m pleased that we scored a goal so late in the game,” Taylor said. “I’m pleased that the players showed a togetherness to come back into a game where I felt a point was a fair result.

“I’m pleased for the players. What they’ve done today is they’ve come back into a game and looked really strong in the last five or six minutes.

“I felt we were good today, just that one error where their centre-back runs through all of our players and passes the ball into the back of the net. But we responded really well to that.

“Things, I believe, are getting better. A month ago we probably wouldn’t have got a point. What they’ve showed together was a huge togetherness to get a point.

“If we’d have lost here it would have been a travesty because we deserved at least a point out of that game today.”