Bloomfield determined to 'bounce back' with Luton as he plans talks with his Hatters squad

​Luton boss Matt Bloomfield has made it clear that he wants the Hatters to do all they can to bounce straight back following a disappointing and embarrassing relegation to League One at the weekend.

Town’s 5-3 defeat at West Bromwich Albion on the final day means Kenilworth Road will be hosting third tier football once more next term, for the first time since the 2018-19 campaign when Luton went on to win the division, as they continued their climb from non-league to the giddy heights of the Premier League. With Hull City drawing at Portsmouth to climb above the Hatters and condemn them to the drop, then Bloomfield is eager to get to work on a return to the Championship as soon as possible, saying: “We have to now make plans, we have to be forward thinking.

"We have to make sure we’re prepared for next season and we have to make sure that things go the way we want them. It’s very disappointing, it’s particularly painful right now, but I’m a resilient character and I’ll bounce back with our football club. We’ve done a huge amount of work to drag it back to where it was. The result was very disappointing.

"We can only take that in isolation, but the amount of work that’s gone into giving ourselves an opportunity will continue and the club has to bounce back and we will. We have to be confident as I believe in our football club, I believe in our job that we’ve seen the improvements that we’ve made over the previous two months and we have to be relentless in going after more improvements.”

With Town’s dismal season now over, there could well be a hefty rebuild undertaken in the summer as Bloomfield will look to get in the players he feels are best suited at leading them out of League One. He was keen to let the dust settle before going into detail on just what is required, adding: “I think we need to take our time to assess that this week and make plans.

"We needed to let this season play out before we were too committed to what we need to do for the summer, but unfortunately relegation will mean that there will be things that happen and that’s natural and it will be a process we will go through. Inevitably there will be football decisions that are made and some maybe put on us and some maybe we make ourselves. It’s the nature of the game, it doesn’t matter what job you’re in, that’s always understandable to be the situation.

"We need to take a couple of days to figure out where we need to go and then we need to put plans in place and make sure we execute them. We have meetings with the players this week, I’ll be speaking to them individually, that was always the plan, irrespective of how the weekend played out. I’ll be speaking to the players and then we’ll reassess and speak to them over the summer and make sure they’re ready for pre-season.”

Asked if he what were some of the determining factors as to just why the Hatters weren’t able to beat the drop this term, Bloomfield, who took over from previous manager Rob Edwards in January, added: “I think because of the pain of the situation and the frustration of the day, it would be probably not right to be too committed to answering that right now. We need to really digest it and make plans to come back. In any relegation there’s a number of things that could and have gone wrong.”