Boss not bothered about Town's recent record at York
Remember the stat about the Hatters never winning a league game at Mansfield?
When that fact was put to Nathan Jones prior to the 2-0 win at Field Mill last month the boss simply shrugged his shoulders, thanked the reporter nicely for the information and then proceeded to explain that history could not affect how his team would perform on the day.
This weekend the Hatters travel to York City looking to end a run of six matches without a victory at Bootham Crescent.
What’s more the Town haven’t even scored during that time. That’s 556 minutes of football. Not since Iain Hiller netted a late winner back in September 2001 has a Hatters player breached the Minstermen’s net on Yorkshire soil.
So. Nathan…Luton don’t have a good record at York…
“History is history, there’s nothing we can do about that,” Jones told the gathered media at his Thursday afternoon press conference at the Town’s training ground.
“All we can focus on now is what we do day to day and then when we go into games.
“We don’t look at, ‘well we haven’t won there before’, ‘or we haven’t got a good record there so we’ll adjust this’, no we don’t.
“What we do is we evaluate what we need to do now and we do that. We’re looking forward to the game, it will be a difficult game regardless of history or regardless of any record.
“It will be a very, very difficult game.”
After losing heavily at AFC Wimbledon a fortnight ago the Town bounced to winning ways by beating Hartlepool at Kenilworth Road last Saturday.
Consistency has been a key word for the boss since he took over at Kenilworth Road.
And Jones is hoping the Hatters can build on last weekend’s success against Pools when they take on a York side fighting for Football League survival.
“We had a good result at the weekend. We bounced back from an uncharacteristic performance at Wimbledon and now we’re looking to get that consistency in our performance levels,” said Jones.
“We’ve had to show character and we’ve had to go over a few hurdles in terms of we’ve not won here, we’re not won there, we’ve not done this, we’ve not done that.
“But we’ve done a few things in the last few weeks and hopefully we can continue doing things that haven’t been done before apparently.
“Even though we’re not too concerned about that, we’re concerned about our results and what we do and if that ties in with psychological barriers or ticking boxes then fine.
“What we’re looking to do now is trying to get back-to-back wins, which is important if you want to try and climb the table and get any kind of consistency.
“That’s what we’re looking to do this week. It’s a big game, important game, an important few days.”
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