Bloomfield not paying too much attention to Luton's dismal away form

Although aware of the terrible away record he has inherited, new Luton boss Matt Bloomfield is confident the Hatters have it in them to end their near record-equalling run of 11 straight losses in all competitions on the road at Oxford United this evening.

The Luton chief replaced Rob Edwards at the helm last week, taking over a side who have not managed a single point outside of Bedfordshire since a 1-0 win at Millwall on September 14 over four months ago, losing 10 matches in the Championship and also beaten in the FA Cup too. Their worst ever losing run stands at 13 which was managed in both the 1898-99 season and the 1927-28 campaign, while they also had lost 12 successive games more recently, in the 2019-20 season under Graeme Jones.

Asked what he makes of it, Bloomfield said: “It affects me to the point where I have to understand where everyone is in the building. People are talking about it and people understand it, so I have to be respectful of that and understand. There's no point being naive to think it’s not there, it absolutely is, but I’m looking at it as a game in isolation and it’s a game I want to go and compete in and present ourselves in the right way.

"We’ll speak about it a lot, about our identity and character and courage and looking to go there and go and play. If the principles are in place we believe we can go and put on a good performance. If we can do that then you give yourselves a chance of getting a result.”

Asked if he had felt a sense of nerves from his new players regarding heading to the Kassam Stadium tonight, as bar Isaiah Jones, who featured at Nottingham Forest, the majority have become accustomed to heading home empty-handed this term, and last season too, with just three away victories in total during the calendar year of 2024, two in the FA Cup at Bolton Wanderers and Everton, speaking yesterday, he continued: “No, they were fine, the boys were great, the boys have been really, really good.

"I don’t want to go over the top and keep saying it because it just looks like I’m saying the words, but they’ve been really receptive. We had quite a long meeting this morning, longer than what I usually like to do, but there’s a lot of information to go over at the minute and we’re trying to get everyone up to speed and get ourselves immersed in the group as quickly as possible.

"The players are really respectful. They listen, they look to implement it out on the training ground and if you look at our performance on Saturday (0-0 draw with Preston), it seems like they’re quick learners. We want to keep heading in that direction, so I’ve not got any feeling about the away form. I understand it, but my sole focus is on making sure we go and perform and if we do that, we give ourselves a chance of getting a positive result.”

With Bloomfield having gone back and watched a lot of footage of the Hatters and their players to gain a bigger wealth of knowledge about the kind of side he was taking over, on whether he had picked out anything from viewing the away games that he believes can lead to an upturn in results, he added: “There’s some things that we’ve tried to go after in the short term and we did a lot of that last week and we tried to do that this morning too.

"We can’t try and be too clever and implement everything we want to do overnight, it’s just not possible for the players to take on that much information. Obviously away from home, you have to be solid, you have to make sure you don’t give your opposition a leg up and give their fans too much to cheer about. We’ll try to be as solid as we possibly can, but at the same time as you’ve seen from the away form that we had earlier in the season at my previous club, we want to attack and we want to win games.

“So we want to try to get that balance right and really feeding into the belief of the players which when you’re on the run that we have been away from home, it’s easier said than done. But that doesn’t change from my belief that this group is still capable of going and winning games on the road. It’s got the ingredients to go and do it and we absolutely believe in the group that they can do so, if not I wouldn’t be sat here believing we can turn it around.”