Still working hard on Town’s final third

Luton have scored just three goals in four matches so far, but have struggled to create a host of clear-cut chances in any of their games, something Still is more than aware of.

He said: “It’s our final third play, it’s the creating of opportunities, more so than anything else, even more than the scoring of opportunities.

“I can’t look at anyone and think they’ve missed, it’s creating those opportunities.

“I think we’ve got to find a way and to get the link up a little bit better.

“Attack-wise, we’re not in the groove at the moment.

“Our work-rate is very good, organisation very good, our half play, very good, their half play, not great, final third play, not good.

“We were similar last year, not making enough chances, but gradually working at it, working at it, we were able to find a way to do it and ended up scoring over 100 goals.

“Now it’s easy to say that’s going to happen, I don’t know if it will happen, but I do know we’ll work hard to make that happen.”

On how Town can rectify the their lack of opportunities, Still continued: “The link up between the midfield and front players hasn’t just quite happened.

“No-one’s done poorly, Gutts (Luke Guttridge) is a link for us, but isn’t quite up to speed yet.

“But how do we get him up to speed? So we’ve played him for an hour in games, working him hard in training, trying to get him up to match speed.

“Roons (Luke Rooney) has done okay. He’s probably the one person with a spark in the final third, so it’s just that linking up together we need to work with.

“We knew that the link up play between the front people and the midfield was going to take a bit of work as we were waiting on Gutts.

“He could train, but the kicking of the ball was a problem, so we had to wait to do that.

“We’ve done it a little bit with Rooney, then tried him in the wider position, looked at the organisation of one sitting in front of the back four.

“We’ve done a lot of work and I hope that all that work comes to fruition.”

Still believes that a number of injuries to Town’s right-sided players has been tough to deal with too.

He said: “We’re a touch unbalanced which is no-one’s fault.

“We’re missing a lot of right footed players which is very unusual, no (Paul) Connolly, no Curtley Williams and if we add to that, no (Shaun) Whalley, no (Alex) Lawless.

“It’s down that right hand side, we lacked that little bit of balance for how we try and play.

“We want to get people on in the wide areas, attacking people.

“Shaun’s a good runner with the ball and attacking people, he started really bright pre-season.

“Alex Lawless was bright too, Paul Connolly was getting up there and Curtley in Portugal was good.

“But we haven’t got them and we’ve got to find a way of making something happen down the right hand side.”

One aspect of Hatters play that did impress Still was defensively, as they have limited their opponents to few shots at Mark Tyler’s goal thus far.

He added: “We’ve been steady, we’re not good, we’re not bad, we’re steady. In all of the league games we’ve played, we’ve had some really good parts of the games for different reasons.

“Defensively, I think we made a mistake for the goal on Tuesday, but we defended very well as well did last year.”

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