Forward-thinking Shrewsbury Town manager Paul Simpson has already turned his thoughts towards next season by identifying players he wants to bring in.
Simpson, preparing for a busy summer of wheeling and dealing, knows his transfer activity is limited to an extent given that 20 players are under contract for next term at Oteley Road.
But Simpson is excited about the challenge of reshaping his squad and revealed he’s keen to dip into the loan market to entice higher division players to the club.
“I’m thinking about the changes I want to make,” he said. “We are restricted a little bit but that’s something I knew when I came in. I knew it wasn’t a case of waving a magic wand at the end of the season and everything would be changed.
“There’s a decent squad of players here and what we need to do is try and add some better quality to improve it, and maybe even next year look towards the loan market to see if we can bring players in from higher leagues to do a job for us on a short term basis as well.
“I have players in mind who I would like to bring in. Whether I can actually do that remains to be seen but there are players out there I would like to think will improve us as a group.
“We want to do better than we have this season. If I thought this football club was going to be happy to finish third or fourth from bottom then I wouldn’t have wanted to come here.
“But I get the impression from things that are being said and things that I’m seeing that they want to do much better than that. That’s what I want to do. I want to be competing at the right end of the table and to do that I think we need to change the squad around.
“Between now and the end of the season we want to get as many games covered as possible, find out who’s available, who’s out of contract, and then hopefully we’re going to be in a position to move to bring them in.”
The 20 players under contract for next season include Neil Ashton and Michael Symes, who have been on loan to Macclesfield since early January, with Simpson – who released striker Andy Cooke earlier this week – revealing: “We expect they’ll come back in the summer.”
Simpson added he was unlikely to experiment too much over the final three games of the season, beginning with Saturday’s trip to relegation-threatened Mansfield. “I think it would be disrespectful to the other sides if we put out a weakened side,” he said.
“I also think it would be disrespectful to our supporters because they’re paying good money to go and watch us and we’ve got to put out the strongest team that’s going to give us a chance of winning.”
Simpson is hoping his players can build on Sunday’s morale-boosting 3-0 demolition of rock-bottom Wrexham which all but assured Town of their place in League Two.
“It’s ridiculous that we were even having to consider before last weekend that we were involved in a bit of a relegation fight,” he said. “Now we’ve got to make sure that we play with confidence, go relaxed and hopefully show people what we can do.”
Simpson added he was keen to take another look at on-loan Doncaster defender Graeme Lee, who underwent dental surgery earlier this week after suffering a nasty facial injury at Chesterfield.
“He was still very groggy when I spoke to him on Tuesday but I’m desperate to get him back in and be able to see him between now and the end of the season,” said Simpson.