Bristol Rovers manager Joey Barton has praised the job conducted by Steve Cotterill at Shrewsbury Town, dialling back his previous comments at the start of the season surrounding the 58-year-old’s style of play.
Rovers take on Shrewsbury in their penultimate game of the 2022/23 season for the reverse fixture of a bad-tempered 1-1 draw at the Mem back in August where Barton was scathing in his assessment of the visitors’ gamesmanship and blatant direct approach. Cotterill was also subjected to some vile abuse at the end of the game by a small group of Rovers fans.
The contest in Shropshire will be between League One’s 13th and 15th-placed sides, meaning a distinct lack of consequence and importance on the result, but six weeks ago Shrewsbury were very much in the play-off race. A run of seven defeats from eight matches has ended those hopes, but the Shrews have largely overachieved having finished 18th last term after periods where they looked in danger of being relegated.
And while Barton and Cotterill may possess different approaches to the game - something highlighted by the former recently when discussing Derby and Sheffield Wednesday, albeit with those clubs’ respective budgets vastly different to that of Shrewsbury - the Gas manager accepts neither is ever the “correct way”.
“There’s many ways to skin a cat; 1,500 passes against 15 passes, who knows? You’ve got to play to the best of your players’ ability,” Barton said. “I’ve got the way I see the game and I want to control it because of where I’ve been and the experience I’ve got but there are many other ways to do it.
“You’ve got to look at the job Steve’s done. I think last year they were in a relegation fight right up until the end, so the fact that they’re not and they’ve had a little look at the play-offs in that they were the form team in the early part of the year, okay, they haven’t managed to sustain that, but I think Shrewsbury will see that as great progression.
“Okay, it’s tricky with the mindset of the lads when you get to that 50-52 point mark. It’s natural that they start thinking about the future and if you do that in our game, as we found out in recent weeks, that one or two per cent can be the difference whether you win or lose a game.
“Steve’s got his way of doing it, he’s been successful and he’s had more promotions than me as a manager. There’s no one way to play football, there are many opinions, and many different styles.”
Unlike Rovers’ last two matches, away at Peterborough United and Plymouth Argyle, and their final game of the season with the visit of Bolton Wanderers, this game has no bearing on the promotion race.
That therefore opens up the opportunity for Barton to select a slightly more unconventional line-up which would enable him to get a better look at some individuals who he has to make contract decisions on over the summer, most notably Harry Anderson and Calum Macdonald.
However, it will still be a senior Rovers team with not much scope for experimentation beyond that, as goalkeeper Jed Ward is the only member of the academy set-up who can be considered worthy of a starting role.
Barton still wants to finish the season strongly, buoyed by Rovers’ battling 0-0 at Posh on Saturday, and with designs on finishing above fellow promoted side Exeter City who they stand level on points with going into the concluding week of the campaign.
“I’ll see how the lads come out of the weekend and where their bodies are, but again we’ll be picking a team to go and win,” Barton added. “We don’t have a 23s, Jerry Lawrence won’t be getting slung in. We’ll be picking a strong team of men whichever formulation we go with. It’s not rotating or that we’re playing academy football here. We’ve got win percentages and fans to please, and our own individual targets.
“Exeter lost so we draw level with them and we want to be the best of the newly-promoted teams and that’s all we can win at this moment, so you’ve got to find these wins. These are the little targets. We weren’t the best team in League Two last year, okay we might have been in terms of form, but over the 46 games we were the third-best team, by the skin of our teeth.
“We’ve come up with those teams and a nice marker would be to go, ‘we were the best of the newly-promoted teams’. I think that’s a really good marker for the group.
“Yeah, it’s nice if you kick into the top 10 or a play-off run - fantastic, and there were parts of the season where we got excited when that was there - but I think when the dust settles, and we’ve got a glass of Sangria on the beach, I think we’ll look back and go ‘okay’
“For me, I took over a club that got relegated and we managed to get back at the first attempt and it was very, very important we stayed here. We’re now starting from where you would have hoped to take the job, where you’re a League One side that’s validated by the season before, so that allows you to attract a different type of player - different loans, different permanents.
"But also our fanbase know this team keeps scrapping and fighting and its a young group and we’ll all on a learning experience together.
"The future, in my opinion, here is very, very bright and I’m excited over these last two games. Hopefully we can get two wins and we get another chance to look at a promotion-thinking team. We beat them and we go, ‘we’re not a million miles away’ and we can go away and attack the off-season ready to go again next season.”
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