Luton Town boss Rob Edwards is "really excited" to begin this season’s play-off campaign, but is conscious not to look too far ahead in the fight for Premier League status.
Edwards cited his own personal experience of Championship play-off promotion while playing for Blackpool in 2010: “The time where I was part of a successful team (at Blackpool), we finished sixth and we beat Nottingham Forest in the semi-final who finished a number of points ahead of us. That was a long time ago, but I’ve experienced it. I think where we finished probably hasn’t got a part to play now, it has been a fantastic season and the players do deserve a lot of credit to finish third in this league, it’s really good. But we’re not done, and we don’t want it to end now.”
The Hatters manager was asked about the group which fell at the semi-final stage last season and if those involved last term will be using that heartbreak as motivation this time around.
“We hope so. You can’t guarantee that you are going to win football matches, but we can learn from that experience, we can talk about it. The one thing that I’m looking for is the performance, doing our basics and those things really well because that’s what has served us well throughout the season so far. If we do those things right you give yourself a good chance of getting a result, but we can’t guarantee that win so I can’t say ‘yeah, we’re going to go one step further’.
“I feel that we are in good shape. We’ve got a pretty healthy squad to choose from, which is great as well at this stage of the season. We’re in as good a shape as we could be, but we’ve got to go and do it.
“They’ve been great. We’ve known for a few weeks (about play-offs), but this week there’s been a shift in the focus and I’ve seen that out on the training pitch, that’s really encouraging.
“We always try to keep the game tight in any game. The game is all about scoring one end and keeping the ball out at the other so we always try and keep it tight. But we’ll always try to win the game as well. We’ve got our way to do it and Sunderland have theirs, I’m sure it will be an exciting couple of games, but we’re not going up there to just sit, wait and let them come onto us, that’s just not how we play. If a draw is a good result, only time will tell, but we’re not going up there looking for that at all.”