Edwards felt Luton's teenage trio proved they can cope with the Championship
Hatters boss opts for hugely inexperienced trio to face the Clarets
Luton boss Rob Edwards felt that the three teenagers he picked during Monday night's 4-1 defeat against Burnley have all shown they are capable of playing in the Championship this season.
The Town chief gave full league debuts to academy graduates Joe Johnson and Zack Nelson yesterday, with summer signing Reuell Walters also making his first ever start in the Football League having joined from Arsenal in the summer. Nelson recovered from letting seasoned pro Josh Brownhill go to collect Lucas Pires’ terrific throughball and put the visitors in front to give a tidy performance, particularly in possession, managing a pass success rate of 97.4 percent from his 39 attempted.
Walters, who had made nine outings for the Gunners in the Football League Trophy prior to moving to Kenilworth Road, was the main bright spark on the night, showcasing some real tenacity in his untried role as a right-sided centre half, also demonstrating some terrific skill when attacking after the break to ghost past his man almost set up a goalscoring chance for the Hatters.
Fellow defender Johnson looked like he was building into the game until he was beaten for pace by Wilson Odobert, the Clarets attacker able to go through and nutmeg Thomas Kaminski for the second time in the evening, doubling his side’s lead late in the first half. The England U18 international struggled at times to cope with the pacey threat of Vitinho in particular, as he was replaced with 10 minutes to go by winger Andros Townsend.
Although it was a tough night for the trio, there was still a number of bright points for Edwards regarding their displays, as he said: “I think it’s pretty clear, I’ve got seven key people that are out that would potentially be ahead of them at the moment, but also they showed some real positives. A couple of academy boys stepped in and overall did very, very well and they’re going to continue to get better.
"I thought Reuell and Zack in particular were very, very good, so they’ve shown us that they can play at the level. In a way it’s a good thing, but of course, there’s a good number of players there we would like to have available. Overall those three teenagers that were playing, that started the game, I thought they were very good.
"There was always going to be one or two mistakes. They’re human beings, against good players. They’ll improve from that and we’ll support them with that as well. So that was a positive, but people don’t want to hear me talking about positives tonight as we’ve lost the game, and we’ve got to make sure that we improve.”
Although Edwards decided to leave far more experienced players such as Tom Holmes, Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu, Andros Townsend and Cauley Woodrow on the bench, and go with the three teenagers instead, the first time that Luton had done so in a league game since Jake Howells, Harry Worley, Michael Spillane and Chris Martin started against Shrewsbury in November 2008, he had expected his side to be able to get a result against the Clarets, who themselves were also relegated from the top flight last term.
The boss added: “I was confident, the performance showed that. You look at it with your eyes, I haven’t seen any kind of stats, there’ll be large parts of it that we dominated, but in the end, they get the four goals so it doesn’t matter about that. In the end it’s goals, goals win games and they did that a lot better than us.”