Still revels in Hatters’ second half showing

A Josh McQuoid double saw Hatters progress at a venue where they were beaten by the same scoreline just three weeks ago.

Then, Still had been highly critical of Town’s performance after the interval in which they let a 1-0 lead slip, but his players clearly learnt from the errors of their ways, producing a far better showing in the second period as the Luton chief said: “It’s always good to win a cup game, our cup form has been good this year.

“I thought we started slow for the first 20 minutes, the boys were moaning about the wind and the rain and the pitch, I don’t know why it was so long, and they found it hard to move it.

“But once we got into it and saw the half out, conditions improved second half, the rain stopped, wind stopped and we played really well.

“We played like Luton, moved the ball well and I thought we had good variations as well. When we’ve gone into front people early, we’ve got around them well and moved the ball much quicker in the second half than we did in the first half.

“They play a longer game, I’m not knocking that, they play the big diagonals to the front men, we don’t do that, and it was difficult to move the ball.

“I felt we were too long moving it and that gave them a chance to close us down, second half they couldn’t close us down as well.”

One thing that had frustrated the boss though was the goal Luton conceded as from a corner, Scott Cuthbert was beaten far too easily in the air by Matt Harrold for Crawley’s equaliser.

He continued: “I’m really disappointed with their goal, we’ve got to do better than that with the goal as at that time I thought we were in control.

“I know why I’m disappointed and I’ll deal with that, we shouldn’t have conceded that.”

However, McQuoid bagged an injury time winner after great work by Paul Benson as Still felt the last-gasp effort furthered his claims that Hatters will always push for the victory.

He added: “The thing that pleases me is that I want to win. We’re 1-1 away from home in the cup and we’re trying to win, that’s what’s important to me, to go to win.

“I’m not worried about losing if we try to win and we could have settled for 1-1, got people behind the ball, gone with one up front when Jack (Marriott) come off, but we didn’t.

“We stayed as we were and we are going for the winner, we got the goal and we won.”