Luton boss pleased with how Town's players reacted to his public dressing down at Carrow Road

Luton manager Rob Edwards has been pleased with the manner in which his players have taken their public dressing down following the 4-2 loss at Norwich City last weekend.

After the game at Carrow Road, the Town boss went over to applaud the near 2,000 away supporters who had made a second lengthy journey in just a few days, having travelled up to Leeds United on Wednesday night to witness a 3-0 loss at Elland Road, but while in recent times the former Welsh international has held his hands up to say sorry to the visiting fans for the manner of the performance, this time there was no such apology.

In fact when speaking to both the local press and official club website, Edwards preferred to point the blame firmly at his players for the individual mistakes that had led to all four goals, stating that they had thrown away a game he felt was there to be won. Asked how his squad had taken hearing such a damning indictment from the manager, who has always taken responsibility for the performance himself beforehand, Edwards said: “They’ve been good.

"I think they’ve accepted it and think they’ve been mature about it and dealt with it in a way that I expected them to. They’ve worked hard, the environment, the place, has still been lively and not down. No-one’s been sulking or moaning about it, people stand up and want to try and take action, so we want to see that in the performance tomorrow.”

With the players such as Teden Mengi, Thomas Kaminski, Tahith Chong, Mark McGuinness and Amari’i Bell clearly knowing how they made mistakes during the contest, on whether he needed to double down on the errors of their ways when reviewing the game in the week, Edwards revealed it was done with the entire squad rather than singularly. He continued: “They know, but we’ll go through it. Sometimes you've got to judge it, sometimes it might be with individuals, sometimes it might be in front of the whole group.

"The way we went about it this week was with the whole group because there were multiple, there were a few people involved. In the end they just need to know, because it’s not something that really we want to accept, but we’re all human beings. We make mistakes, but decision-making and the way we conceded was not really acceptable. We’ve done it as a group and tried to not put it to bed but learn from it.

"It was a group meeting where we could highlight some of that stuff but then also again I’ve got to repeat, some of the stuff that was good. Everyone wants to focus on the mistakes, because that’s what cost us but within the game, there were some good things. It was honesty, that’s all and people have responded in the right way, so not difficult conversations. Having honest chats are always beneficial. I don’t think there’s any point in hiding behind things, people need to know what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling, that’s how I try to work anyway.”

Town’s 4-2 defeat in East Anglia means the Hatters have now conceded more goals in nine away games than they did on the road in the entire 2022-23 Championship promotion-winning campaign. Having performed so admirably in the Premier League last campaign, asked just why he thinks Town’s players are making the kind of errors that they weren’t doing against some of the best players in the world, Edwards added: “Because there’s been an inconsistency in form and results, confidence is lacking a little bit and then that can lead to a decision and some basic errors, that’s all I can really put it down to,.

"What you don’t want is a day like that last week where too many of them crept in where the opportunities that they had or the goals that they scored all came from things that were avoidable, pretty big things. It’s difficult then to really understand that, and why, especially when we started the game pretty well and went 1-0 up. We looked okay, we were pretty comfortable, and again at 2-2. So it was difficult almost to put your finger on that, even when you review the game, I thought the overall performance was pretty good, the ideas were good and unfortunately we got punished for individual errors.”