Luton boss Nathan Jones conceded he should have

Town boss: I wish I'd made 11 changes ahead of Cardiff rout

Hatters manager will have to address third game in a week issues

Hatters boss Nathan Jones


Luton boss Nathan Jones conceded he should have made far more changes to his side ahead of their 4-0 defeat at Cardiff City yesterday.

The Town chief had spoken in the week about a need to freshen up his side for their third game in seven days, but only made the one alteration, midfielder Ryan Tunnicliffe in for Elliot Lee.

It backfired though, with the Hatters conceding two sloppy goals in the opening 10 minutes to give themselves a mountain to climb.

Although they looked to have a glimmer of hope in the first half, Pelly-Ruddock Mpanzu and James Collins going close, after the break, it was all Cardiff, scoring twice more as Town went down with a whimper.

When asked if with he should have rotated his team more, Jones, who had seen Luton go into the fixture on the back of a four match unbeaten run, said: “I wish I had made 11 changes, I genuinely do if I could have.

“We have to address because three big games in a week, we seem not to be able to handle that and to maintain those levels, so I’m going to have to do that I think in terms of freshen it up, to get the level of performance.

“It’s very difficult to do that as you're damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

"If I had done that and we were beaten 4-0 today, it could have seemed like I was not taking it seriously, so it’s very difficult.

"But something has to change with that, as we don’t get turned over midweek, we usually get turned over that third game in a week.

"We didn't do the basics well enough today, and that was the embarrassing thing.”

Jones did make two substitutions before the interval, replacing Mpanzu and Luke Berry with Sam Nombe and James Bree, while he also threw on Lee, Tom Lockyer and Joe Morrell in the second period.

On the decision to raid his bench ahead of the break, he added: “If I’m honest, without kneekerking, I wish I could have turned the clock back and played a different side.

“We needed to do something, because we weren't making the impact, we were 2-0 down, so we needed to change something, give them as maximum time as possible.

“But it didn't make any difference, Joe Morrell I thought was excellent when he came on, there was not too much Tom Lockyer could have done, but I think whatever I did today, we needed have 12 or 13 men to have done anything more.

"As we were nowhere near the levels we've been at, we were nowhere near the levels you need to come and compete with Cardiff and that's the sad thing really.”

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There must be a pocket book (or App these days) called "Handy excuses for a football manager after a defeat or bad performance"

This seems to be the 'players were tired excuse'.

But Cardiff also played the same number of games as Luton and used 85% of the same players.

So the result between two tired teams was 4-0 to Cardiff.

Get over it Mr. Jones it just wasn't your day.

Maybe our amazing performance was in the gift of Luton then.
Lets see if we can continue to the same level of performance as yesterday.

There must be a pocket book (or App these days) called "Handy excuses for a football manager after a defeat or bad performance"

This seems to be the 'players were tired excuse'.

But Cardiff also played the same number of games as Luton and used 85% of the same players.

So the result between two tired teams was 4-0 to Cardiff.

Get over it Mr. Jones it just wasn't your day.

Spot on Tony and obviously his excuse book forgot to remind him his team had an extra 24 hours recovery time from the midweek games.

Lets cut him some slack lads. Didn't he used to play for us?

Lets cut him some slack lads. Didn't he used to play for us?

We did by not scoring a fifth goal

Maybe our amazing performance was in the gift of Luton then.
Lets see if we can continue to the same level of performance as yesterday.

Well we all hope that

I've said before on threads, that for a few seasons now our results drop when we have a lot of midweek games it used to happen with Warnock and he often used to complain that there were too many games coming too quickly.

It's a squad game more than ever this season, we have a decent squad, I would expect us to improve as the season goes on the same as last year