Luton chief won't be overreacting after two defeats in a week

Luke Berry puts his point across against Watford

Luton boss Nathan Jones won’t be making any dramatic changes to his preparation for Saturday’s home match against Wycombe Wanderers despite suffering two defeats last week.

To put it into context, the Hatters were knocked out of the Carabao Cup by one of, if not the biggest club in world football, Manchester United, losing 3-0 at Kenilworth Road on Tuesday night.

For large parts of the game, Town were more than a match for their illustrious opponents, who required a triple change, bringing on Marcus Rashford, Mason Greenwood and Bruno Fernandes to kill the game off.

Luton were then beaten in the league for the first time this term,1-0 at Watford on Saturday, the Hornets having a number of players who were playing in the Premier League for them last term.

Going into a match against the Chairboys, Jones said: “We won’t change too much, since I’ve been at the football club, we’re plus 55 per cent win ratio, so we’ll do what we normally do.

“We won’t overreact or anything, we’ve had a big week, had a big exertion against Derby who are a more established Championship football club than us.

“Then we’ve played Man United with absolutely superstar players.

“They put three into Brighton who are a fantastic Premier League side, and then we played Watford who were a Premier League side last year with 10 times our budget, with athleticism that we, without being disrespectful, can’t afford.

“We took a Watford side who are probably up there with the favourites to get promoted, right to the wire, and to be honest, I’m gutted about our performance.

“If we’d been at it we’d have got something out of the game, so we’re in a good place.

“Now we dust ourselves down, we’ve got Wycombe, a big game, leading into the international break, give them time off, then we can regroup and go again.

“We’ve lost two big players (Glen Rea and James Bree) for us this week and we’ve just had a flat performance, we haven’t had one yet.

“We’ve played six games, we’ve won four, lost two and this week has just been probably a week too far, but we played Man United and Watford that a few years ago, they were dream games.

“We can’t get carried away, we lost by the odd goal and the good thing is we’re in a place at the minute where we don’t need three to win a game, two to win a game.

"If we score a goal we actually pick up points every game, and that’s a good thing.

"Today’s (Saturday) not a great day but we dust ourselves down, make sure we prepare well and in god’s will be better next week.”

The trip to Vicarage Road was Luton’s sixth game in 22 days as Jones felt that taking on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s side in the week clearly had an effect on his side’s freshness.

He continued: “I’ll tell you our preparation, we prepare for Man United first as I can’t prepare for Watford, so I prepare for Man United.

“We have to go to the wire, EFL have said we can only have three substitutions, so you can’t freshen things up, so that’s one thing.

“Wednesday, you get them off, Thursday you come in and most of your squad have actually played and taken Man United to the wire, massive exertions.

“In training you risk injuries, so we couldn’t do too much Thursday, Friday we prepped like we normally do, but we’ve had injuries, Glen Rea, James Bree.

“So three people have had to double up and play 90 again and it showed as I thought a few of them were off it.

“During the game we matched them up, then we went for it a little bit more, put on as many strikers, front men as I possibly could have done, but whatever we did, we didn’t win headers, didn’t get on second balls, didn’t sustain attacks.

"When we got in areas, we didn’t pick people out, we didn’t test the goalkeeper.

"Short of playing myself, I don’t think I could have done too much more, but that’s not to say we won’t look at ourselves, as I thought we’d have been on the front foot.

"If we’d have been on the front foot we’d taken our chance, run out of steam and then Watford with their Premier League squad, overran us, I could have accepted that.

"But at no point did this seem like a derby. There wasn’t a tackle in the game, it just didn’t feel like a derby in any way, shape or form, and a lot of that's to do with fans, but then the majority of it was my players didn’t respond to that.

"I can't often say that, but I can say that today as I don’t think they responded to the level of game it was.”