Luton chief happy to get that ‘winning feeling’ back ahead of Hammers clash

Town boss knew it was crucial to pick up Carabao Cup victory over Gillingham

Luton boss Rob Edwards highlighted the importance of getting that ‘winning feeling’ back amongst the Town players with a 3-2 Carabao Cup triumph over Gillingham at Kenilworth Road last night.

The Hatters had started the Premier League season with back-to-back defeats, going down 4-1 at Brighton & Hove Albion on the opening day and then losing 3-0 to Chelsea, although did put up more than decent fights in both matches.

With West Ham United heading to Kenilworth Road on Friday night, Edwards wanted his side to go into that contest against the high-flying Hammers with a victory under their belt, and despite making heavy weather of it in the second period, goals from Jacob Brown, Alfie Doughty and Cauley Woodrow saw them through to tonight’s third round draw.

Speaking afterwards, Edwards said: “We talked a lot about it, we wanted to get that winning feeling back.

“Alright it’s been a tough start, a couple of games, we’ve not won but tonight was important that we did to go into Friday with some real momentum.

“We know now it will help, it will help with that feeling around the place and tonight a lot of people in football, we’ve all seen it before, newly promoted team, they’re going to make quite a lot of changes, Gillingham have started well in the league, it was a potential banana skin there.

“So I think it was overall really positive to come out with a win as the end result was important.

“We could only win by winning the game.

“The expectancy was obviously on us, it’s a little bit different to the last couple of games we’ve had, so overall very pleased.”

Edwards did make a host of alterations to his XI for the game, eight in fact, giving a debut to keeper Tim Krul, with Brown and Chiedozie Ogbene both earning their first starts, while Mads Andersen, Pelly-Ruddock Mpanzu, Luke Berry, Doughty and Woodrow all came in too.

Although it meant Luton weren’t ever at their undoubted best, that was something that Edwards had always anticipated could happen, as he continued: “We had quite a lot of changes, tweaked the shape a little bit, and I liked a lot of what I saw.

“It was a really good start, I thought we built on it as well and controlled pretty much all of the first half.

“Going 2-0 up was great, an unbelievable goal from Alfie, we know he’s got that in him, and we spoke at half time about the next goal.

“The next goal is going to be really important and the game can really hinge on that.

“They got it, they probably had five or 10 minutes then when we had to deal with that, play forward, run forward, direct play, set-pieces, but we still looked okay.

“Cauley’s goal settled us down and I thought controlled it again until the very last couple of minutes.

“There’s probably a reason if we lacked a bit of fluency or rhythm tonight, I was going into it thinking we might, but actually there was a lot of good things that I saw.

“Three brilliant goals, I just think when we’ve got that control, we just need to see it out a little bit better.”

Conceding so early on in the second period and then just before the final whistle was definitely a cause of frustration for Edwards though, as he added: “From the beginning, the onus is on us to go and win the game.

“They can play with a freedom and there’s an expectancy that we need to win and should win, I get that.

“Getting that goal back got their fans up, their fans were brilliant, and they probably had a 10 minute spell where we had to weather it.

“We made a couple of changes, got some control back I felt and we should have seen it out a little bit easier than what we did towards the end.”