Edwards gives himself some rare praise for 'pretty incredible' two years as Hatters boss
Town chief knows expectations are at an all-time high this season
Luton boss Rob Edwards gave himself some rare credit for the job he has done at Kenilworth Road after completing two years in charge of the club recently.
The Hatters chief celebrated his anniversary on November 17, 2022 having been appointed as Nathan Jones’ replacement when the former Town chief opted to leave Kenilworth Road and move to Southampton earlier that month. Edwards’ reign has been your classic rollercoaster ride too, reaching the dizzy heights of the Premier League when giving Town fans one of, if not the best, days of their lives when winning the Championship play-off final.
An at times thrilling top flight campaign ultimately ended in relegation, although that has unfortunately led to something of a downward spiral this term, Town losing exactly half of their league matches to date. However, asked to sum up his time at the helm, Edwards said: “Pretty incredible, I think we’ve done quite well and I’m going to give myself some praise, I don’t often do it very much. We got promoted to the Premier League and we gave it our best, we had a good shot. Now we’re finding it tough, we’re having a challenging period now.
"It’s probably my first challenging period that I’ve ever really had, I’ve got to work through it, I need this. We’ve had some pretty difficult times and it’s thrown up things that I never thought I’d have to deal with, but it will make us all better and stronger, it will. Tough times don’t last, neither do the good ones, it’s just you’ve got to keep going."
Experiencing a relegation, and not just any old relegation, but one out of the glitz and glamour of the Premier League and back into the Championship again was always going to take some time to come to terms with for the Hatters players too, particularly as the majority, if not all of them, won’t have gone through something like that in their careers.
Having kept a large number of them who had actually played a role in getting the club to the highest tier of English football in the first place, the challenge is now getting them to replicate that achievement again, but as one of the perceived top dogs in the division, as Edwards continued: “We did retain quite a lot of ours (players), but they’ve had to go through a lot. The players, they’ve reached the top for some of them. It’s almost like a pinnacle and what an achievement and then it’s right, we’ve got to go again.
"Finding that, that’s what we’ve got to do now, so it’s new for the whole club, the supporters and everyone, getting relegated from the Premier League. We’re all having to work through this. The two clubs that went down with us having experienced this before, we haven’t, so we’re going through a process now at the moment when we’re finding out a lot about everyone. In the long run, we’ll be better for it, there’s no doubt about that.”
Going into the current campaign though, ambitions were set by Edwards and his players to be challenging for the Championship title, or at the very least be doing far better than the 16th position they find themselves in following Saturday's 1-0 win over Hull City. No-one is more aware of that pressure than Edwards though, who added: “Because we’ve risen the standards, we have, that was happening before as Nathan (Jones) had done that and then we’ve continued it.
"When you raise the standard, people expect more and I expect more. I think the players will say the same and we are trying, we’re trying really, really hard and we’re going to find that consistency. I’ve got an amazing group of lads who have done brilliant things for this football club. We’ve got to find a way to find that something that got us there before and allowed us to perform so well and so consistently last season as well. It’s been difficult, it’s been challenging for everybody, but the spirit and the fight is there.”