Town attacker urges Luton to cut out the 'soft goals' that are threatening survival bid

​Luton striker Elijah Adebayo has urged his side to start cutting out the ‘soft goals’ that are beginning to threaten their Premier League survival hopes.

​Following a confidence-boosting 2-1 victory over Crystal Palace last month, the Hatters have now lost three in a row against Brentford, Arsenal and Manchester City. Town’s previously solid-looking defence have been breached nine times in that sequence, with the opposition not having to work too hard in which to do so, as Rob Edwards’ side have seen their defensive errors punished.

Following a poor second half showing at the Gtech Stadium in which the Bees netted three times in 32 minutes, Town then gifted Mikel Arteta’s side two of their four goals in midweek, before City took advantage of some errors when Jack Grealish bagged a winner on Sunday.

It led Adebayo to say: “We’re giving away soft goals at the moment, we know that, we need to cut that out. Week on week we are going to learn and hopefully those soft goals will be cut out and then we’ll start picking up some points.

"The boys were fantastic though and we know that we played the two toughest teams in a week and we came so close. The other night (against Arsenal) was heartbreaking, it was very flat and we had to pick ourselves up to come and try and put on another performance. I think everyone inside the stadium could feel that until they scored their goals and then we knew it was going to be tough.

“We were still in the game right up until the end and just needed that one chance to fall to someone and we could have taken it. It wasn’t meant to be, we’ll rest up, we’ve got another big week, important game next week so we’ll be relishing the challenge to try and get some points again.”

It was the same for fellow attacker Jacob Brown, who started both games against the Gunners and City, as he added: “We’d rather perform like that and show that we can compete against these top teams, it’s just so frustrating as we’ve been playing really well, but maybe conceding goals that we can probably stop.

“We knew it was going to be like that and having the game against Arsenal prepared us for that, but you just can’t switch off which I think we did well for the majority of the game. If one of your team-mates is out of position you’ve just got fill in for them and we knew that, we all worked so hard, we’re just disappointed to come away with nothing.

"They’re not carving through us and scoring goals that we can’t do anything about. We can maybe switch on a little bit more or get tighter to our man, but it’s something we’re working on.

"It’s two top sides so we’ve probably got to take the positives from which there are a lot of. They didn’t not create too many chances so we can definitely take positives from that because they've gone to other teams in the league and dominated, but now we need to back those performances up with results.”