No wholesale changes for Jones as he targets fourth

Hatters boss Nathan Jones doesn't intend to make any sweeping changes to his side for the final two games of the season, despite the play-offs being virtually a done deal..
Luton boss Nathan JonesLuton boss Nathan Jones
Luton boss Nathan Jones

The Hatters go to Accrington Stanley today, safe in the knowledge it would take a goal swing of drastic proportions to be caught by the likes of Mansfield Town, Wycombe and Carlisle.

However, Jones won’t be altering his team that much, having been in a similar position during his playing career, as he said: “I’ve been there, in terms of when I was at Brighton and when I was at Yeovil,

"I was fortunate enough to be considered as one that given a rest on the last day of the season as we were already in (the play-offs) in both games.

“But I don’t think that does you any good really, so I want the competition there.

“Everyone’s playing for places, we’ve got, god willing five really important games to go and I’m going to need the squad.

“We may make the odd change, but that might be looking after people in terms of if someone’s carrying an injury, then that might be a time to rest them.

“But I won’t be making changes and thinking I’m going to look after loads because we want momentum and continuity is the key

“We had to make a load of changes early on just to keep everyone fresh, but we are finishing the season strong and I want to continue that.”

Jones also has urged his side to end their regular campaign with a flourish and make sure they get fourth place, which one victory should achieve, with Exeter three points behind and four goals worse off.

The boss continued: “That’s exactly what we want to do.

“We haven’t talked about play-offs or anything really, what we’ve done is put ourselves in a position where it would be difficult for us to fall out. Falling out of it would mean that we lose our last two games and quite frankly we don’t want to do that.

“We want to finish fourth. We know that one win will probably do that, but we’d like to finish fourth as we believe we’re a good side in this league and we want to establish ourselves.

“Plus if it does go into the play-offs with good momentum, there’s cliches, but they are, as we want to finish strong.

“We’re on a decent run at the minute and we want to continue that run, because sides that go into the play-offs on good runs tend to do well in them.”

Jones also thinks that by Town's automatic promotion hopes already having ended, with Doncaster, Plymouth and Portsmouth out of reach, that could well work in their favour ahead of the play-offs.

He added: “We want to finish as high as we possibly can, we set our goals on automatic, we haven’t quite done that, so we want to finish the next best thing and that’s fourth place.

“Psychologically it’s a good thing to as normally when fourth place teams go in there, they’ve usually been battling right until the last day and have dropped out and then been psychologically down which has affected them and the players.

“If we do get into the play-offs, we won’t have that as we’ll know that was the best we could have done three or four games from the end anyway.

“What we want to do is get our house in order so that we are finishing the season as strong as possible as if we suddenly go on a unbeaten run of five games then we’ll probably get promoted."