Good afternoon and welcome back to the home comforts of Kenilworth Road for a rare but very welcome 3pm Saturday league match.
Today we host Hull City, who started the season with high hopes under their new manager, Tim Walter, but find themselves on the same number of points in the lower reaches of the Championship table as ourselves with 15 games played.
We welcome everyone who has travelled from the north-east or further afield, including the travelling Tigers support and their full-backs Cody Drameh and Ryan Giles, who we thank for their contribution to our 2022/23 promotion, in Cody’s case during his loan spell from Leeds, and to our Premier League campaign, in Ryan’s.
Indeed, all players on both sides today will harbour ambitions for their clubs to return to the Premier League and when a short run of wins in this crazy division can take you from the verge of the relegation zone to the periphery of the play-offs, anything is possible.
Encouragingly, it’s at Kenilworth Road where our recent performances have shown promising signs of steady improvement and consistency, springboarded by that demonstrable derby day win.
Arguably, our recent home performances have been more consistent than our results. Sometimes don’t get what you deserve so we certainly hope that our fortune evens out over the course of the season.
However, to acknowledge that we’re finding our feet at home is only half the battle. We all know that it’s our away record that has been less than satisfactory, since our single-goal victory at Millwall following the first international break in September, culminating in the humbling defeat at Middlesbrough.
Our unsatisfactory away performances and results is a topic which we’ll certainly not hide from. Indeed, with the current Championship season still having more than two thirds still to run, entering the international break presented us with an opportunity to take a deep, collective breath before reflecting upon our current situation – to fully understand why we’re not firing on the requisite number of cylinders that should be seeing us challenging at the other end of the table.
While I could wax lyrical about the specific reasons why I feel we are where we are, I believe it would be far more constructive to explain that this last fortnight has felt like a defining period where, collectively, we have delved in detail and searched our souls to identify how we can gain much more consistency.
Suffice to say though, it is apparent that our Club’s culture has been under attack over the last few months. Not by any dastardly enemy, or by Leagues, Associations (or even referees!), and not by our opposition; but brough on by ourselves.
The pride we have all felt over recent years has been amazing, as we have all enjoyed our unparalleled rise, ticking off four consecutive promotions while upholding the ‘Luton-way’ by keeping to our principles on and off the pitch and even maintaining a financial sustainability at the envy of many other clubs. A rise which resulted in us arriving at the promised land, with many believing that we had ‘reached our destination’.
So, it shouldn’t be a shock when, upon hitting our first big bump in the road – our first relegation for 15 years – it had more of a seismic effect than perhaps a minor impact of a flat tyre.
There have been many factors at play here too. Pretty much everything we’ve been through over the last 18 months has been untrod territory for all of us. Despite our experience (and perhaps age), we are still learning. Indeed, many of our supporters won’t have been old enough to have experienced or remember what a relegation feels like. We are all learning.
Thankfully, our captain Locks is well on his way to full recovery and fitness, but those events that unfolded last December have, quite naturally, had a long-lasting effect on us, but often consciously forgotten. The summer transfer window was a huge education for everyone involved as we saw unscrupulous agent after unscrupulous agent take pop at selling many of our players an unrealistic fantasy which was a somewhat unplanned and hard to navigate disruption.
Along with a number of other obstacles en-route, I can’t deny that we’ve all been tested over recent months. It’s rather obvious that our rise couldn’t simply keep continuing – a stall at some point was more than inevitable – but it was always about how we recover from the impact.
The duty to protect our club culture doesn’t just fall on those representing us on the pitch or others at the Club. Your willing contribution is also important. Arguably, too many of us were guilty of high expectations, as a former Premier League club, to continue the level of our performances almost seamlessly.
External factors will always come into play and are often impossible to proactively avoid and, what I would urge everyone to be willing to accept is the submission that this is a process that has needed to run its course, but for us, collectively, to battle on and uphold the ‘Luton-way’. This is our own battle, and we are determined to overcome it.
After an inspiring coming of minds over the last few days, we are motivated by the head-strong determination from everyone which we hope will reveal itself today and, more pertinently, at Leeds and Norwich in the coming days.
This has been a good break for more reasons too, as we’ve seen as many as eight players go away to represent their country, with Mark McGuinness becoming the latest Luton Town player to be capped at full international level by the Republic of Ireland in their Nations League visit to Wembley last Sunday.
Mark will acknowledge that, whilst possibly the proudest, it possibly wasn’t the easiest 90 minutes of his career, coming up against an England side buoyed not only by their 3-0 win in Greece four days earlier, but by a penalty awarded together with a red card for one of his centre-half partners with the score at 0-0.
No-one can doubt that Mark had played his part in keeping Harry Kane and Co at bay in that first half, nor underestimate the size of the task that followed for the ten men in green after the dismissal and conversion of the penalty.
Despite the result, it was still a proud moment for Mark – and for his family and all of us at the club, too. He may only have been with us for a short time, but as with Amari’i Bell, Daiki Hashioka, Marvelous Nakamba, Teden Mengi, Zack Nelson, Joe Johnson and Dylan Stitt during this latest international break, we are delighted to see our players represent their country and carry Luton Town’s name around the world.
Indeed, in this most recent break we have seen yet another of our young prospects, Harrison Dunn, called up by England U15s for the first time for a training camp at St George’s Park.
Well done to all of those lads and fingers crossed that, as I write these notes, they all return to The Brache with a clean bill of health.
Whilst singling out recent action from our own players, please make sure you give a warm Luton welcome to Lamine Fanne Dabo, who will be introduced to you on the pitch before kick-off today, after finishing the Swedish league season in style with AIK Stockholm before his formal registration with us in January.
Those of you who have followed his progress since we announced his signing in August, you will know that Lamine has produced some outstanding performances in the heart of midfield during the run-in for the Swedish club, culminating with a hat-trick of assists in the victory over Halmstad that secured European football for next season.
Lamine will now take a short break for some well-deserved R&R and has come over for a few days to receive his nutrition and training programmes, begin his integration with the squad and get used to his new surroundings before starting a mini pre-season at The Brache next month, so he’s ready to go in January.
Let Lamine witness the Kenny at its most passionate best today.
Let’s hear you from minute one, let the lads know they’ve got you in their corner and let’s start fighting our way up the Championship table. There are 93 points still to play for.
Come on you Hatters!
