Welcome back to Kenilworth Road for this lunchtime kick-off against a Bradford City side who have had an impressive first half of the season following their promotion from League Two.
It’s the Bantams’ first visit to Bedfordshire since our 2018/19 title-winning season, when Elliot Lee’s brace and a goal each from Harry Cornick and a certain James Justin were on target in a 4-0 win.
From afar in recent weeks, we’ve seen our older JJ scoring in the Premier League for his current club, Leeds, while before our own eyes we have witnessed the more recent version, JJ Junior, emerging in the left-back position as Joe Johnson grows in stature and confidence each week.
It’s a source of pride for our Academy that Joe and Zack Nelson, along with the likes of Christian Chigozie, Harry Fox, Zach Ioannides, Jack Lorentzen-Jones, Dawid Gawel and Fin Evans have all featured in first team action this season, and that another local lad, Josh Neufville, will be in the opposition squad today.
Sometimes a player has to leave the club at which they come through in order to find their feet in professional football, and Josh is certainly one who has done that with AFC Wimbledon and Bradford, as he approaches 250 career appearances by the age of 24.
We welcome Josh back to Kenilworth Road, along with his Bradford manager Graham Alexander, who made 183 of his 1,024 career appearances during his four-year spell with us in the late 1990s.
Last week’s 1-0 victory over Blackpool here was a deserved and much-needed result after two successive away defeats, and today we look to close the gap on the play-offs by making it 10 league games unbeaten at home.
Turning our home into a fearsome fortress again has been high on Jack and Chris’ priority list since they took control, which is so welcome after an extensive period of players finding it difficult to perform consistently here. Thankfully, this has changed in recent weeks and months, which serves as a massive confidence-booster for our current squad and our new arrivals.
So, lo and behold, we now have another opportunity to continue to build our home form courtesy of Wednesday’s anticipated and highly expected EFL disciplinary decision falling in our favour which revealed that Swindon had been removed from the Vertu Trophy. This came as a result of them fielding not one, but two players who either were not named on the official matchday team-sheet or should have been serving a seven-match suspension.
It was an inevitability that we would progress to a quarter-final at home to Plymouth and, although at the time of writing we do not have a confirmed date for the fixture, we know that it will not be this coming Tuesday, 10th February, as scheduled.
Before kick-off last Saturday we announced the third of our five January signings, by welcoming Devante Cole joining on a permanent contract from Port Vale. Devante is a tried and tested striker who, while playing in a struggling side, has proved his value this season as we found to our cost in December, and previously in his last two League One campaigns in which he helped Barnsley into the play-offs.
This leads me nicely into a little review of this winter transfer window that closed on Monday night.
Having earlier welcomed Emilio Lawrence and Kasey Palmer – who in the last two games especially has really shown his quality and how important his experience will be for us as he gains momentum with every match in the heart of our midfield – we entered the last week of the inevitably tumultuous window.
A warm welcome also, not only to Luton but to England, to Sverre Sandal and Davy van den Berg who arrive from the Norwegian and Dutch top divisions respectively. As Jack has already explained, Sverre will need a little time to get fully up to speed as his season with KFUM finished at the end of November and he is currently in his pre-season. However, on the upside, it won’t be a prolonged absence and he’s young, fresh and raring to go.
Like Emilio, Davy felt like he needed a new challenge, but he is at a great age where he already has valuable big game experience from his time in the Eredivisie with Zwolle and Utrecht, as well in the UEFA Europa League this season.
With five players coming in and 10 departing (11 if we include Ethon Archer’s loan upgrade) it meant a reduction in squad numbers by five from the opening half of the season, which exhibits another very active window for us.
Squad churn is always inevitable during the summer, but now we are adapting in style to a new manager, enacting a more aggressive transition made sense at this time, especially given the specific manner how Jack wants us to play, idealistically. Ultimately, we want to get to this point as soon as we possibly can.
We entered the window with a detailed and tailored plan agreed with Jack; to reduce quantity, add quality, increase technicality, blend experience and maturity with energy and youth but with an intent that they can impact now without compromising our growth potential beyond this season.
By and large, we are pleased with the accomplishment of those objectives, supporting Jack with very specific characteristics, which as a board and staff we were more than happy to do.
Going into the last 17 games with Jack and Chris leading us, the principle of less is more is perfectly apt. We now have a tighter group, a more efficient squad to manage, more adaptability and with greater technicality with the addition of some certain targets. Simply, ‘more Luton’, if you like.
Caring for those departing us, temporarily or permanently, is always important to us. A vital aim was to retain a player’s talent value, or even improve upon it, hence why it was our preference to loan players out – to either gain good experience so they can be more useful to us next season, or to improve their chances of either playing for us or to increase their value should they or we decide they move on permanently.
That said, the backdrop of this window meant that this was one of the most challenging trading periods yet, and there are several reasons for this.
As we often iterate with every winter that passes, the January market is very different to the summer market. It’s far more reactive with limited players available as every player is in the mid-term of their contract. It also relies heavily on other clubs’ movements for replacements, which makes most late, reactive moves almost impossible.
But this January in particular, the whole market saw very little activity. It was one of the lowest spending winter windows on record with very little big money flowing down the food-chain, which resulted in very late, panic buying by other clubs – something we simply needed to carefully avoid.
All our incoming business was planned and balanced to not only help us immediately, but also with a longer lens focus. Davy was a player we looked at bringing in last summer, who should be able to affect our midfield from minute one, while Sverre has been a data-led target for some time, having been observed in a market we know very well.
Like it or not, AI-led data techniques are used greatly at the top end of the game as they are an amazing tool if used as an evidence-supporting function, and are more and more adopted uniquely by us, while recognising that they can never be influential in final decision making. Computers aren’t ‘taking over the world’ yet ;-)
Having suffered two key injuries in the days before the deadline also meant we had to be very adaptable in our approach in replacing them, if possible, and added a necessity for those who joined us to be adaptable to different ways of playing.
Thankfully now the window is closed, Jack, our staff and our tight squad of players can focus on the job in hand, we can finally kiss goodbye to the burden of expectation that comes as a ‘parachute tax’, and we can spend the next three, hopefully four, months concentrating solely on our ambitions on the pitch and the target of promotion back to the Championship.
Upon closure, we also took the earliest chance to trigger our option to transfer Gideon Kodua on a permanent basis. Knowing Gids will be with us for the longer term will be received very positively, and is a move we are all excited about as it neatly transfers a loan to a permanent registration, making our squad even more manageable for Jack.
While we wish all our loanees the best in their spells away from the Town, we also say good luck to Lamine Fanne in Italy, and a heartfelt thank you and farewell to Marvelous Nakamba, who played such a key role in our promotion three years ago and brought his permanent smile to our club, even in some tough times. An amazing player and a true gentleman.
Having a trim squad also brings fantastic opportunities to our younger players as they become more involved in first-team training and edge a little closer to squad inclusion. So, a huge well done to Joe Deeney, Ronnie Henry and the youth team lads who have won their PDL Cup quarter-finals in both U17 and U18 age groups over the past few days, beating Huddersfield and Grimsby with 11 players featuring in both matches.
I would also like to touch on our Conference-winning captain’s enforced retirement from playing, after suffering a fractured fibula in his third game for Southern League club Kings Langley last Saturday. What a career Ronnie’s had, and it’s typical of the now 42-year-old that the injury hasn’t prevented him from continuing his coaching duties at The Brache and on the touchline at Blundell Park this week!
It would be remiss of me not to provide an update on Power Court, albeit very positively short this time. Last week, we completed the piling for our West Stand, ahead of schedule.
Finally, I’ll close with a plea for us all to make Kenilworth Road a ground our new players quickly grow to love, while continuing to show those who have been here a while, but maybe haven’t heard the Old Girl in absolutely full voice yet, that it’s a place ready to make some final memories before we depart in 2028.
The atmosphere in recent matches, notably the wins against Wycombe, Orient, Stevenage, Blackpool and the draw with Lincoln, has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging, and I know that Jack, Chris and the players have used it to inspire them, especially at some difficult moments.
They also know that it’s a two-way process, in that their performance helps generate that atmosphere, and they will be doing everything to make sure that we head into a testing run of away games with another win this afternoon.
We need to come out on top of 17 cup finals between now and early May, with eight of them here. Maybe some have written us off too soon into this season, and that fighting spirit for which Luton sides are renowned is coming back to the fore and propelling us forward.
Be loud, be proud and help our boys towards our goal.
Come on you rip-roaring Hatters!
Gary
