Town boss Rob Edwards is well aware that there will be no ‘easy ride’ for Luton in the Championship this season.
The Hatters begin their second tier campaign at home to Burnley on Monday, August 12, with expectancy high both inside and outside of Kenilworth Road about the club’s chances of an instant return to the Premier League. It is the complete opposite to last year, when Town’s relegation from the top flight was widely anticipated even before a ball was kicked, and despite putting up a real battle to stay up over the course of the 38 games, Luton found themselves in the bottom three when the campaign ended.
Although Town have lost Ross Barkley to Aston Villa, with Sambi Lokonga heading back to Arsenal and now on to Sevilla, they have still managed to keep a large number of the squad together, with bookies pricing them as third favourites at 10/3 for promotion this term. With that brings a change in pressure for Edwards and his players, and discussing how they will cope with that when a guest on the High Performance podcast, Edwards said: “That’s going to be really different for us to handle that.
“We got promoted when we weren’t expected to, we were massive underdogs all of last year and we did get an easy ride there’s no doubt about it. We’re losing games and people are going, ‘Luton did well, they competed well,’ so I get that. We have now got to be able to deal with the expectation that we’ve got to be up there and we’ve got to win more games than we lose, so that is going to be interesting and how we deal with that. We’ll have to talk about that openly to get everyone ready to deal with that.”
Being back in a Championship he had escaped via the play-offs with Luton in the summer of 2023, didn’t mean there was any less desire on Edwards’ part going into the new season though, as he admitted he is already imagining another day of celebrating when the job of being back in the the highest tier of English football is hopefully completed, adding: “I feel really good and really motivated.
“The Premier League fixtures came out and I was jealous, I remember receiving those last year and being so excited, but it just fuels the fire to want to get back there. We can’t guarantee, but I keep imagining it. The two things we did at Forest Green and at Luton from day one, we told the lads, we’re going to get promoted and I keep visualising it in a year’s time.
“Watching Southampton and Russell Martin doing what they did and Kieran (McKenna, Ipswich Town boss) and Enzo (Maresca, former Leicester City chief), they did incredible. Seeing all those people achieve something this year, it makes me think, that’s got to be us, I want to feel that again. I encourage it and what’s wrong with that? Then it’s maintaining that with our supporters and the expectancy this season as it’s inevitable in this league that we’re going to have some difficult moments so we’ve got to be able to deal with that.”
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