LUTON TOWN

Smell that coffee

“We play good football. It is pleasing on the eye. It is the way to go”.

Bollocks to that, I say. In 99.9% of situations football is about winning. Winning football is good football in my eyes. Let’s have an intellectual debate shall we about varying styles and how some have more artistic merit than others? No let’s not bother. We don’t have three purists holding their scorecards up after the game giving us 7, 7, 6 to Luton’s 2, 4, and 3. We got zero points on the scoreboard. The Hatters got three.

Wake up and smell the coffee, or more accurately the whiff (stench) of the Conference. Ten games in I am more convinced than ever that the football we are attempting to play is not suited to League Two. I use the word “attempting” because for the most part it is not coming off. I don’t think it is the big deal that some are making out anyway. Just because we don’t play hoof ball doesn’t mean that everything will turn out rosy eventually.

Mapp’s CV

At present it is not as if we are a cash strapped team expecting to be bottom of the pile. This makes matters worse.

So our five game unbeaten run, which brought all of one win, is over. Michael Appleton’s record for us is atrocious. His poor stats at Portsmouth, Blackpool and Blackburn have been explained away in most quarters by the fact that these clubs were all, to varying degrees, in some kind of crisis at the time. Well, now he has players under his command who have the ability to be performing at a higher level. I honestly believe that. Which tells me that Mapp just doesn’t get what League Two is all about in exactly the same way as Jim Smith was bemused by the Conference. (Or was it something else?). Appleton has said that he won’t change the way we are playing. Unless he backtracks I am seriously worried.

Rub of the referee

To those who say we are not getting the luck and that referees are doing us no favours, I totally concur. But that doesn’t mean it will all suddenly turn our way. That’s not the way it works. Our problems need a deeper fix.

About a minute in, Tom Newey and a Hatters attacker both appeared to slip. Referee Mark Haywood decided it was a free kick to the home side. That was unlucky but the way we defended the ball when it came in wasn’t. Johnny Mullins, I think it was, was out jumped and Luke Wilkinson powered a header past George Long.

Almost immediately we nearly went two down. Although we don’t concede goals by the bucketful we do have something of a soft centre. That softness largely comes from the lack of effective cover in front of the back four. Mullins was beaten in the air again. We had men back but Josh Ruffels got in a tangle and Pelly Ruddock had a great opportunity, but put the ball wide. For once we should perhaps give Long credit for coming off his line.

There are games when we could do with Michael Raynes as one of our two centre halves but given Mapp’s philosophy I can’t see him getting a game unless either Mullins or Jake Wright are injured or suspended.

At just one down there is always the belief that the game will be salvaged but that belief largely dissipated when the Hatters got their second on 67 minutes. They had a free kick near the half way line. In similar circumstances we would have knocked the ball short and ended up with about a 5% chance, if that, of having an effort on goal. Luton banged the ball into the penalty area and ended up with a penalty and a goal. Appleton, Derek Fazakerly, Mickey Lewis, Darryl Eales, Mark Ashton, Ian Lenagan and everyone else connected with our football club please, please take note.

That it shouldn’t have been a penalty was another bit of bad luck and bad refereeing. Deliberate, no way. Danny Hylton was jumped into and when his flailing arm which had shot above his head made contact with the ball he was looking away. Long’s save was a good one but he got across too far and knocked the ball back into Jake Howells path. If he had needed to stretch more to make contact the ball would have gone out of play for a corner.

The bloody referee

Time to talk about the referee. Quite possibly the worst of the season and the standard has been incredibly low, so that is quite an achievement.

Some referees give free kicks and wave their yellow card about if a couple of players as much as brush together. Others allow all manner of thuggery to go unpunished. Haywood was one of the latter. With such lax officialdom there is a very real chance of serious injury. Nor does it help in our seemingly forlorn attempt to play pretty football.

Within the first few minutes a Luton player had slid in studs up and caught Newey on the ankle. It was not a yellow card. It wasn’t even a free kick. We lost Michael Collins before the half hour mark. He walked past the away fans with socks rolled down. The damage that had been inflicted on him was there for all to see. Brian Howard was also picked out for rough treatment and got no protection whatsoever from Haywood. Players were taken out off the ball but nothing was done about it. This hatchet job on Howard worked as he largely became anonymous. Luton were like Stevenage but carried out their cynical approach in much more dangerous fashion.

Haywood steadfastly kept the yellow card in his pocket but even he had to concede a booking was appropriate after the rotund Steve McNulty came up with a rugby tackle. It was this leniency that saved Tyrone Barnett from a red after he jumped in studs up. I’d like to argue that he only did this as a result of what had been allowed to go before.

Man of the Match

For me, man of the match was Jake Wright. He did some magnificent defending when one v one at the back. That he was put into that position a number of times is further example that we do not defend properly as a team. Newey too had a good game. He doesn’t shirk any battles.

There were times when Wright brought the ball out from the back. Ideally he wouldn’t go far but had to keep going because he had no one in space in a decent position to give it to. Yes we had the vast amount of possession but it’s what you do with the ball that matters. We play it around in areas that don’t really matter. Perhaps a bit further up the field than under CW but watching performances like this I wonder if the difference really is as big as some would like to believe. The loss of defensive solidarity away from home is not something I would have done the trade for.

Forwards

Barnett sent a powerful header straight at keeper Mark Tyler near the end of the game but the one he should really have buried was glanced wide. Power on that occasion would have done the job.

He’s close to being an asset but he has to start delivering pdq. I liked the way he came back and helped in defence. I liked the way on one occasion he picked the ball up and ran into the opponents half. I then hated the sloppy back heel he produced. A million quid? Prove it.

With Danny Hylton out of sorts, he should have stepped up to the plate to be our goal scorer. But there didn’t seem to be any understanding or effective combinations on show when we got in the final third. Other than O’Dowda’s crosses what did we really create?

Positives?

I’m struggling. Show me the wins and show me the points then I’ll show you the positives. I don’t give a s**t how we acquire these desperately needed points.

The Luton Experience

So again we let the other guys take the spoils but what of the whole match day experience.

Luton is not an appealing place. We had no desire to wander off in search of a beer that would probably have been sub standard anyway. That meant we were in the ground by two o’clock which is almost unheard of for me. Standing on the Oak Road before entering, the prominence of the constabulary could not be missed. Their peace keeping forces included a “mobile cordon” van. It all came back to me as we walked up the stairways so close to the washing hanging in the local backyards that we could have grabbed it off the line if we had been that way inclined.

The Oak Road stand is possibly the best example I’ve ever come across that screams, no, no, no, to bolting seats on to terracing to satisfy the requirements of the Taylor report. We really are going back decades now and that is where this stand belongs. The view is awful, what with the shallowness of the terracing and all the bloody pillars obscuring the view. And there is so little leg room that it is physically impossible for someone like me who is over six foot to fit in. It was just as well that the announcement that spectators were required to sit in their seats was ignored by the stewards. The big plus though, was atmosphere. Those old stands really hold the noise, the buzz, the crack. Unlike at the Kasstad this game had a life on the terraces.

Luton is a place I want to get out of in speedy fashion at the best of times but even more so when we have lost.

As we came out it soon became clear that retracing our steps to the car wasn’t going to happen because the mobile cordon van had transformed into a steel wall that completely blocked the street. Kids of a certain age who were into Power Rangers and Transformers toys will understand how this can have happened.

So we were sent the other way only to be met by a blockage of vans, men and women all of the police variety. We were told that we were going to be held back and then all moved out together, towards the station. I explained that there were a lot of us in this kettled situation that would rather not go back to the station because we had come by car and not train. In that case we were supposed to have a word with the officers at the back who would let us peel off in twos and threes and go our own way. The police we were having this debate with were doing it in the best of humour and when they said they were only acting on orders I 100% believed them. They did say, we’ve got 200 people in here that we cannot let out, and I think they may well have been right. But eventually they did let us sneak out round the back of one of the vans to find our car and head to Dunstable for a couple of much needed beers and post match discussion. The conclusion was, we’re worried. Very worried.