Tony Mowbray feels Blackburn showed a level of performance against Shrewsbury, in a 3-1 win over our promotion rivals, that few would be able to match in League One so that could, if not would, ultimately result in promotion.
Blackburn moved to within two points of second placed Shrewsbury following this victory, which ended the Shrews’ own 10-game unbeaten run and further extended Rovers’ brilliant unbeaten league run too.
Charlie Mulgrew opened the scoring as he curled home a 25 yards free kick. However, Shrewsbury were level before half time when Jon Nolan converted a penalty past David Raya, the goalkeeper had himself conceded a foul on Carlton Morris.
Having been denied in the first half by a fine save, Bradley Dack was again in the second when his volley came back off the post – fortunately Danny Graham was on hand to turn in the rebound.
When Dominic Samuel was brought down Mulgrew had the chance to secure the points and the Blackburn captain did just that when slotting home a 70th minute penalty.
Commenting post-match, Mowbray told the Official Website: ‘I’m pleased, I thought the performance level was what we’d hoped for. If we play as well as we did today throughout the rest of the season, there aren’t many teams that will be able to beat us.’
Mowbray went on to say he thought the preparations were perfect as the players weren’t ‘over-hyped’ and therefore ‘forgot to play’ but weren’t ‘too undercooked’ either, all in all the boss through we ‘got it about right and from start to finish.’
Adding: ‘We’ve studied Shrewsbury who have done fantastically well this year, they have a lot of athleticism in their team so we were primed to go and match that really. We said beforehand that we had to give our maximum with no half-hearted performances from anyone and I think we got the job done today.’
