Luton boss refuses to be drawn into whether the Hatters are now involved in a relegation fight

Luton boss Rob Edwards refused to be drawn on whether Hatters have found themselves involved in a relegation battle this season.

Having come down from the Premier League last term, then the majority of those in and around Kenilworth Road were expecting a campaign of Championship football that would lead to a concerted push of trying to get back to the top flight once more. However, since a crushing 4-1 home defeat to Burnley on the opening day, those hopes have turned into what now appears something of pipedream, the Hatters sitting in 19th place, just two places and three points above the drop zone.

They could find themselves falling even closer to the bottom three this afternoon if Hull beat Blackburn Rovers and Town were to lose at home to Swansea City. However should the Hatters triumph and then follow that up with a success against Stoke City at Kenilworth Road on Tuesday night, it would see things looking far more healthier ahead of the congested festive schedule.

With that in mind, Edwards didn’t want to state his side were battling to survive this term, saying: “I’m not looking that far ahead at the moment, it’s the next game and it’s about finding that consistency, I’ll just repeat myself on that at the moment. No, I think we’re not in a position at the moment to talk about whatever the season is going to be, it’s too far ahead at the minute. We’re in the situation that we’re in, we’ve got to find improvements and consistency to get ourselves away from that.”

Luton’s record four wins, two draws and three defeats sees them sitting 13th in the form table for home matches, as it’s outside of Bedfordshire where the real problems lie, seven defeats from nine making Town the third worst team on their travels in the division. Asked why he thinks there has been such an issue when heading away from Kenilworth Road, Edwards continued: “There’s a lot of things but we’ve not been able to reproduce the consistency we need in the games.

"As not every single away game, but for a large spell for quite a lot of games we’ve shown that’s us, that’s really, really good, and then whether it’s been a mistake that’s knocked us or a double whammy of goals, we’ve not quite been able to recover. We almost did last week (at Norwich), coming from 2-1 down, at 2-2. We took control really from 47 minutes to about 80 minutes, it was a really good performance.

"The consistency in game at home as well. We’ve been able to remain more consistent in that 90-odd minutes and stayed in the game, or once we’ve got the lead been able to more often than not keep it there, but it’s been consistency within game and that’s been the big difference between home and away. If we knew the exact reason we’d be able to amend it, we’d have picked up results by now.”

Although Town made it six straight losses away when being beaten 4-2 by Norwich City at Carrow Road last weekend, Edwards did see enough to believe that things can get better on their travels, adding: “It’s difficult to say after the defeat the other day, but when you do look at the game back and when I did review it in the cold light of day, taking emotion out of it as well, it was pretty good against a good team.

"The errors that we made just stand out and affect everyone’s thoughts and feelings on it, which I get, but we’ve got to try and look at it in a different way, look at individual’s performance and the team’s as well. I thought we found a really good way of being aggressive but also not being as open and then we looked definitely more of a threat midweek than against Leeds, created some decent opportunities.

"There was a decent balance there. It wasn’t perfect, I know that, but it was a step in the right direction from how some of those away performances have been. It is very difficult to say that’s exactly what we need to do because if we had that exact answer to that we’d be able to do it straight away.”