Hylton will continue with protective mask

Town’s leading scorer was on the bench for the trip to Crawley Town last Saturday, as although boss Nathan Jones hadn’t wanted to use the forward due to his cracked cheekbone, he came on midway through the second half, with Hatters trailing 1-0.

He couldn’t change the result, Hatters going on to lose 2-0, but should be fine for tomorrow’s League Two encounter, although will continue to wear a mask as Jones said: “It’s just for precaution more than anything, but he’s healing well, it’s two weeks now since he’s done it, so it will have calcified.

“You couldn’t tell he’d done anything with the way he’s training, so we have to be careful with him and he’ll wear it as a precaution.”

Joining Hylton among the subsitutes at Crawley was Jack Marriott as Jones gave the nod to both Josh McQuoid and Isaac Vassell to see how the duo fared as a forward pairing for Town.

On why he made the calln, Town’s chief said “I did look at it as combinations last week, when it looked like it was a gamble to play Hylton.

“They’ve played well together at Gillingham, played in pre-season together, so we have to test the squad as well and I felt it was the right time to do it.

“The result will say different, but that wasn’t down to the front two or anything like that, we didn’t play well as a team, didn’t defend well as a team for long enough and that’s what cost us the game.

“When you make changes as England found out in the summer, and results don’t quite go for you, you’re open to criticism.

“It was a calculated gamble in that, Danny hadn’t trained with his mask on, only had his mask Saturday morning, so it was a calculated one.

“We have Josh McQuoid and Vassell who are a very adept front two. It’s not like we were massively weakening it, just that our main two so far this season weren’t playing.”

Although Luton now have three games in the space of seven days, it’s unlikely Jones will opt to change things around once more on the back of two straight defeats, as he added: “We have looked, especially with the amount of fixtures we had early on, to where we could rotate certain things and so on but at the minute now it’s just about getting back to winning ways, and building again from there.

“Because we’ve had a fantastic start, stuttered the last two games, but with three games in a week that can quickly change around and that’s what we’ve got to make sure we do.”