Town chief wants his side to show their ‘bouncebackability’

The Hatters go into the game on the back of only their fifth defeat of the campaign last weekend, a 3-1 loss at Charlton, their first reverse since mid-October.

Speaking ahead of the encounter, Harford said: “There’s four games left, four massive games for us, and when you look at it overall, we’ve had a fantastic season and put ourselves in a great position.

“Like I said to the players now, we refocus, keep our feet on the ground and go again, that’s all we can do.

“The run had to come to an end at some time, we now want to start to hopefully get on another run.

“That old saying bouncebackability comes into mind and that’s what we’ve got to do.

“We’ve got four massive games, we’re really looking forward to the challenge as the players are.

“That’s something we’re going to embrace and hopefully we can come out of the other end over the line.”

After leading the way in the past few months, Harford knows just how superb a campaign it has been for his side so far, but warned them they must now finish it off.

The boss also admitted that the players held a meeting after the defeat at the Valley and on what was the subject matter, he continued: “Nothing negative, no berating of the players, no criticism of any of the players at all.

“We were thrilled the way we got ourselves into position this season, it’s been a remarkable season in what we’ve achieved so far, but we haven’t done anything yet in terms of achieving it.

“We’ve put ourselves in a great spot, I wouldn’t change our position for any other team in the league that we’re in at the moment.

“Saturday brought us back down to earth a bit with a bump, as first half we were excellent and could have been out of sight but we refocus and go again.

“The run had to come to an end at some time, but we now want to start to hopefully get on another run.”

Meanwhile, Harford didn’t buy into the theory that Town were vulnerable to suffering back-to-back losses after going down to Charlton.

He added: “One defeat can lead to another victory, you can look at it on the other side of the coin in terms of we’re going to bounce back, we’re going to put another performance in.

“The performance on Saturday wasn’t bad and if we had played anyone else in the league other than Charlton, we might have got through that, but Charlton on the day were very good.

“So we’re really, really positive in terms of going into the game as we do every game.”