Luton boss critical of Town's second half display at Vale Park
Town held to a 1-1 draw by relegation strugglers
Luton boss Jack Wilshere was critical of his side’s second half performance as they were held to a 1-1 draw by bottom of the table Port Vale this afternoon.
The Hatters had given themselves the best possible chance of ending a miserable run away from home when they took the lead after just five minutes through Nahki Wells’ goal from Emilio Lawrence’s cross. Town looked for a second, with a number of shots at Joe Gauci’s goal, Nigel Lonwijk going closest with a header that was palmed over the bar, before they were then pegged back when Ben Waine cut through the visitors’ back-line to score on the half hour.
After the interval, Luton never carried the same kind of forward momentum, having just one attempt on target, that Ali Al-Hamadi’s shot that was saved, while at the other end, Josh Keeley made two marvellous saves to ensure Luton did actually end their six game losing run outside of Bedfordshire.
On the performance after the interval, Wilshere said: “We didn’t do enough in the second half. I wanted us to be braver and especially in the first half after our goal I think we can keep our foot down and keep pushing them back, getting behind them, mixing it up sometimes to find Clicker (Jordan Clark) or to find Jake (Richards) and to attack that way or to get behind them which we stopped doing.
"Then they came back into the game, and in the second half it felt like there was one rhythm, we couldn’t change the tempo, or we couldn’t mix it up a little bit and that’s where we’re at. We have to look at it on Monday, we have to show the players it because we need to get better at it. We want to win of course we did, we set the team up the best way we thought we could win the game and actually I thought we started really well.
"We started on the front foot, picked the times where we decided to play, to get behind them, scored a good goal and then we have to get the second, keep the momentum and not allow them to turn it into the type of game they wanted. You have to accept at times that’s going to happen, you’re going to have to deal with that and I don’t think we dealt with that well enough today. We’ve been really good in my opinion at dealing with direct play, but you can see from the goal, we couldn’t quite get the first contact, but also the second balls today, we weren’t good enough.”