General manager of football operations Lee O’Neill says it wasn’t viable for the Blues to stay overnight in Shrewsbury and play today’s postponed game against the Shrews tomorrow, an idea which Town manager Paul Lambert and his assistant Stuart Taylor suggested.
The match at Montgomery Waters Meadow was called off by referee Lee Swabey just before 2pm due to frozen patches on the pitch which were deemed a danger to players.
"First of all, we are obviously very frustrated that we have travelled all the way down to Shrewsbury only for the game to be called off an hour before kick-off,” O’Neill told the club website.
"Once we were told it was off, it was Paul and Stuart who brought up the idea of staying over and playing tomorrow.
"We have got fixtures piling up and the last thing we needed was the game to be postponed so we looked at the possibility of playing on Sunday and if we had been in ‘normal’ times, then I think it may have happened.
"But we’re not in normal times, are we? We are living with the restrictions of Covid. The hotel we stayed in on Friday opened up especially for us, brought in staff and food especially for us. It wasn’t possible to have that arrangement at such short notice for tonight.
"The weather is still freezing all over the country and while it’s forecasted to improve tomorrow, there are no guarantees that the pitch would have been fine.
"So we had no hotel to stay in, no guarantees of the pitch being playable and we would have gone into the game with the players not having trained for two days.
"We spoke about it as a group but Paul understood the reasons why the only viable thing to do was to turn the bus around and go home.
"In hindsight, it would have been better if, knowing the weather forecast, we had moved the game to Sunday in the first place.
"We could have travelled down today but Shrewsbury were confident the game would go ahead. Like I say, it’s been a frustrating day!”
No new date has yet been set for the match but with both club’s fixture list already very full it won’t take place until April at the earliest.
Meanwhile, former Blues winger Danny Rowe, 28, has joined Burton Albion and made his debut as an 88th-minute sub in their 2-0 victory at Northampton today.
Rowe, who has joined the Brewers on a deal to the end of the season, was released by Town at the end of 2019/20.