Rea's injury not as serious as first feared

The 22-year-old summer signing from Brighton was missing from Luton’s 2-0 defeat at Crawley Town last weekend, with Jones admitting he had suffered the injury after a training ground challenge with Jack Senior.

Rea was sent for a scan this week and although he won’t be available for Saturday’s home League Two clash with Doncaster Rovers or Tuesday’s trip to Hartlepool, Jones said: “It’s not as bad as we first thought, it’s a medial strain.

“He did it in training against Jack Senior and they both got injured in the challenge, so it meant we missed them both which was unfortunate, but to ask them to pull out of something is alien to them.

“They both will be back pretty soon and hopefully sooner rather than later as Glen’s isn’t as bad as we first thought.”

With Rea’s absence, then Olly Lee is expected to keep his place as Town’s holding midfielder for the visit of second-placed Rovers this weekend.

The former West Ham trainee admitted himself he needs to improve the defensive aspects of his game after speaking to the press following the weekend’s loss, and Jones is confident he has the ability to that.

He added: “There’s a diligent group here and Olly’s part of that. He’s a fantastic footballer, it’s just defensively, he needs to improve slightly, but I could name any part of anyone’s game that they need to improve on.

“Everyone has something, otherwise you’re pretty much playing in the Premier League.

“Olly knows he needs to improve that, we don’t need to make a big thing of it. That’s something that’s not his strength, but he’s not in the side for that, he’s in the side because he’s a ball playing defensive midfield player.

“Now if he can improve the other bits then we’ll become a better team, but he has a big role to play any time he plays.

“They all have big roles as we want to do well, we want to win games, we want to play well.

“With Glen out, then it falls to him, but we had Glen come back for the Grimsby game and I started Olly, so I’ve got a lot of faith in him.

“It’s just sometimes you make decisions during a game that changes the direction of a game and sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, but Olly is a big part of our squad.”