Town's appetite has been whetted after Magpies clash

The Hatters chief saw his side put up a fine display at St James' Park, running their illustrious hosts desperately close in a thrilling second half.

After having the reflecting on the contest, Jones said: “We all want to be pitting our wits against Premier League opposition every single week as it means we’re a Premier League club.

"But little by little we’re building and we want to make sure that next year we’re pitting our wits against League One and sporadically in cups against Premier League and Championship and so on.

"Then the year after we’d like to be one step up again, so it’s all building by little steps.”

Striker Danny Hylton, who notched his 17th of the season moments after the interval and then had another goal wrongly chalked off, agreed with his manager, saying: “It gives you a taste, this is a level we all want to be at, and aspire to be at.

“So we’ll keep plugging away this season and hopefully we can make our way up the leagues.

“We don’t play the League Two way either. A lot of teams in League Two are back to front really quickly, I think we’ve been brave, we’ve tried to play football and second half, we were the better team playing our way and playing football.

"We played some good stuff and at times we were the better team in the game. Apart from that little 15-20 minutes in the first half when they scored three goals, I thought we did ourselves proud."

After swapping ends 3-0 behind, it had looked like Luton might be on the end of a heavy defeat and Hylton admitted that Jones hadn't been impressed by the manner in which Town had finished the half.

He added: "He wasn’t happy, he thought the goals that we conceded were silly mistakes, as every one was an error, we left ourselves open to a counter attack and we shouldn’t do that.

"He felt they were goals that we could have eradicated, so he wasn’t happy at all and just said 'cut the silly mistakes out and you're in the game, if you get one, you never know what can happen.'

"We did, and maybe should have had two, Elliot’s (Lee) hit the bar, Gambo (Luke Gambin) at the end, it’s a game we could have got back in to, so it’s still positive.

“There were probably a few bad decisions on the day and that’s the difference you know. They’ll punish you and we should have made a few better decisions, but all in all, a great experience, some real positives to take out of it."