Naismith insists Luton's players will learn more from poor display at Bradford

Luton skipper Kal Naismith insisted he and his team-mates will have learned more about themselves during what was the Hatters’ first League One defeat of the season, beaten 2-1 at Bradford City on Saturday.

With Town named as strong favourites to win promotion back to the Championship this term, Matt Bloomfield’s side had started with successive victories, although failed to really excite in either match against AFC Wimbledon and Peterborough United. They then struggled to get going once more during the first hour at Valley Parade on Saturday, falling 2-0 behind, as despite a marginally improved final period of the game, Gideon Kodua scoring his first goal for the club, were eventually deservedly beaten.

Naismith, who is in his third spell at Kenilworth Road, having joined the club on a permanent deal this summer, wasn’t getting overly panicked by the result though, as he said: “That was a lot of the talk in the changing room, maybe we needed that. Sometimes, not just football but in life, you learn more when it goes wrong or you’re down, so it’s part of the game, we’ll bounce back.

“We’ve got unbelievable coaches, a great manager, he called it how it was going to be. They’re going to put it on us, individual battles all over the park, when it drops down they’re going to spin it in behind and they kept doing that. It was pressure, but there was nothing in the game, they were just doing it slightly better than us.

"Goals change games, that’s what it is. They scored, we get to half time, regroup and then we come out second half and don’t do the things we speak about which is disappointing. We were just flat and it just happens in life. You get those off days, no problem, it’s a long season. We’re going to lose, we’ll probably lose more games this season unfortunately and that’s how football and life goes, it’s how you bounce back.”

Discussing what he thought had gone wrong on the afternoon to allow the hosts to end Town’s unbeaten run in a fairly comfortable manner, Naismith continued: “They pushed three high on to our back three, so then it was individual battles. We only need to be a little bit off in this game, with your footwork or your timing and then it drops their way and it just dropped their way a little bit more than ours.

"Then when we did have the ball we’re such a good team with good players, but we just weren’t doing the basics right. Everything’s built off the basics. You need to win your battles and that’s just the way that football is at all levels, Premier League all the way through. When we’re slightly off it on the ball as well, we’re not going to get away with not winning our battles. It just wasn’t our day and we lost the game.

“When you lose it’s always disappointing. The manner that we lost, we weren’t ourselves. Fair play to Bradford, they’re a good side, did the basics a little bit better than us, which is disappointing as I feel like that’s what we’ve really been doing well the first couple of games. That’s football, that’s life, we lost and we have to bounce back now.”

One thing that did frustrate Naismith was the ease in which his side were breached, both goals coming far too easily, particularly after Luton had gone into the contest having kept successive clean sheets in the league, with the majority of their side apart from Mark McGuinness and Kodua also rested for the Carabao Cup exit at Coventry on Tuesday night too.

He added: “It was gutting because we’ve been so good, so well organised, not looking like conceding at all to be honest. We knew it would be a really tough game coming here. They scored, it’s a bit of a scrappy goal, we let it bounce in our box and I’m not sure whether it goes through Josh’s (Keeley) legs and he (Stephen Humphrys) gets a tap in, it’s just disappointing, but it happens. As much as I wanted to, we were never going to go through the whole season not conceding.

"There are some very good players in this league, very good teams, and the disappointing one for me was coming out for the second half. We know we’re still in it, we’ve not been as sharp as we could be in the first half in all the games, but we’ve always been very strong in the second half. So we were calm, we knew we were going to be strong second half, but we just didn’t get the start we wanted. They scored and it just gives them even more emphasis to hold on, fair play to them it was their day.”