No hairdryer treatment as Jones kept his cool during Ricoh interval

Luton chief Nathan Jones revealed there was no ranting and raving at his players during the half time interval at the Ricoh Arena last night.
Luke Gambin had a real impact from the bench setting up James Collins' equaliserLuke Gambin had a real impact from the bench setting up James Collins' equaliser
Luke Gambin had a real impact from the bench setting up James Collins' equaliser

With Town trailing 2-0 down and some boos emanating from the away end as the players trudged off, rather than lay into his side, Jones confirmed he took a more measured approach to give them the best side of finding a way back into the game.

He said: “Sometimes you’ve got to be tactically astute as well as passionate, you can’t just go on passion alone.

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“Sometimes you’ve got to think and have to take a step back and say ‘what do we need? Do they need a rollocking now? Do they need a hammering? Do they need that, or do they need solutions?

Elliot Lee goes for goal against CoventryElliot Lee goes for goal against Coventry
Elliot Lee goes for goal against Coventry

“‘Do they need a manager that believes in them and says we’ve got to build?’

“It was a similar thing to when we went to Newcastle. We knew we were down and if we went gung ho we would get torn apart, so we said, we go after the next goal but we build, and we did.”

Captain Scott Cuthbert was quick to praise Jones for not flying off the handle after what the players knew themselves hadn’t been a good 45 minutes at all.

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He said: “I think it’s easy to come in and the manager to start screaming and shouting and pointing fingers and we probably didn’t need that.

Elliot Lee goes for goal against CoventryElliot Lee goes for goal against Coventry
Elliot Lee goes for goal against Coventry

“It’s nice to have a bit of calmness, just talk us through it. We changed shapes as well, so we had to tactically go through a couple of things with people moving position.

“He was nice and calm, he shows belief in us, he believes in what we do. He’s been at this club now for a couple of years, he’s got this way of playing, he wants us to play that way and he believes in us.

“We managed to turn it around and put in a performance second half.”

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Jones didn’t make any alterations to his side until Cuthbert had pulled one back, opting to bring on Luke Gambin and Elliot Lee with 25 minutes to go.

On why he waited until that point to raid his bench, he said: “We were tempted to make the changes at half time, but what we needed was to get a foothold in the game.

“So rather than just make kneejerk ones and you never know what’s going to happen, we felt that a change in shape would be more paramount that then change in personnel, so we did that and it proved right.

“He (Gambin) has that creative edge, that’s what he’s here for and that’s what he does.

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“Elliot Lee gave us that little bit as well and we went super positive.

“We’ve got so many positive players on there, we took our defensive ones off, we went very, very positive in the end and it got us the point.”

Jones had made three changes to his side from the weekend’s 2-1 defeat to Accrington, bringing in Cuthbert, Collins and Harry Cornick, switching away from the diamond to a 4-3-3 formation.

However, it led to an exceptionally poor opening from the visitors, as Jones added: “We were nowhere near first half, I was disappointed with the second goal as that gave us a mountain to climb.

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“From 1-0 down you can come back, it’s when we go two down, at Cheltenham and so on.

“We picked a side to keep clean sheets, we put Glen Rea in there, we played a front three, so we had pace but had a little bit of security in the wide areas and we didn’t seem to have that.

“We shot ourselves in the foot after a minute and then right on the stroke of half time with bad decision making cost us, but I’m not going to dwell too much on that now.

“I’m just so proud of the fightback and what we did to get a point.”