Wilshere took Luton's players through a video nasty after Stags thrashing

Luton chief Jack Wilshere revealed he took the unusual step of immediately going through the defensive debacle at Mansfield with his players in the confines of the dressing room straight after the final whistle of their 5-2 drubbing on Sunday.

The Hatters turned in a woeful performance during their trip to the One Call Stadium at the weekend, as following on from an impressive rearguard effort when beaten just 2-0 by Premier League Chelsea a few days earlier, keeping the Blues’ expensively-assembled front-line out for almost an hour, never looked remotely like repeating such a solid display in their League One contest.

Having to go again just a few days after a trip to Stamford Bridge, with Mansfield getting a full seven days to prepare, Town fell 1-0 down after just 18 minutes, Nathan Moriah-Welsh left unmarked to wrongfoot Josh Keeley and slip a left-footed shot into the bottom corner. He then doubled the hosts’ lead shortly afterwards, again allowed time and space to measure a terrific angled drive beyond Keeley and into the net.

Moriah-Welsh became the architect just before the break, his cross-shot instinctively volleyed in by Louis Reed to make it 3-0 and give the Hatters an unlikely mountain to climb. Although Town made three changes at half time, Joe Johnson, Benny Benagr and Harrison Ashby coming on for Kal Naismith, Emilio Lawrence and Izzy Jones, they were breached twice more inside the opening nine minutes when Jon Russell replicated his brace in the same game last season, with another double, left in glorious isolation in which to do so.

Striker Nahki Wells did come on to pull back two goals of his own late in the game, but having seen his side capitulate so easily on Sunday, and conceding 10 goals in their opening three league matches, Wilshere instantly took his players through what he thought had gone wrong, saying: “We had a conversation and looked at the goals back which I’m not always a big fan of doing as sometimes you need to take the emotion out of it.

"However I felt like it was a day where we needed to go through it with emotion and challenge each other, because like I said, I can accept that we’re not going to always be that good on the ball or we’re not going to always be able to find our rhythm or we can’t work out what an opposition’s doing, but we have to be harder to play against and harder to score goals against as we’ve got ambition and we need to stop conceding goals.

“There’s a disappointed dressing room in there and rightly so, but there’s also a dressing room in there with character and we had a good chat and players are talking, they’re challenging each other and that’s what you need.”

Having delivered a performance that was so chalk and cheese from their efforts in West London was also pretty baffling for the Town chief, who had been so impressed with the solidity and desire on display against the Blues, continuing: “It’s there, that’s the mentality. Like I said after the game to the players, that not necessarily in this league, but opposition are going to make you do that, they’re going to make you suffer in a different way and they’re going to make it into a battle and a fight.

"We have to win that, but also we have to accept at times that we can just sit there and defend and be really good, especially when it’s not going our way. We conceded one goal and we concede two goals, we need to say, no, that’s it, let’s get to half time, let's close it up, but we didn’t do that.”

Another aspect that disappointed Wilshere was the manner in which his side allowed themselves to be breached during the first period, as the second goal saw Kasey Palmer lose the ball in midfield, the Jamaican international not getting the foul he was after, before Izzy Jones was then at fault for the third, trying an unwise trick in his own half which saw the ball quickly transferred into the area for the Stags to ruthlessly extend their advantage.

He added: “We’re going to give the ball away right, but there’s areas to give the ball away in. Even the fourth goal, we switched off a little bit from a free kick, but the transition goals they hurt as we need to be better at that. Reading we conceded goals like that and one thing we need to do and we’ve got loads of it in this group is humility. We need to know that this league is tough, we’ve got good players and we need to earn the right, but this league is really, really tough and we need to be better at realising that.

“We made three changes to change it (at half time), I took three players off, it could have been another three players, as we just weren’t there in the first half. The fourth goal which ultimately kills the game is a tough one to take as we switch off from a free kick, but I said to the players after, let’s have a conversation, let’s talk about it, because you’ve been so good, and you need to recognise that, so we need to respond.”