Luton boss Jack Wilshere admitted he was handed a “reality check” as the Hatters’ five-game unbeaten streak came to a crushing and devastatingly bad end at a rampant Barnsley.
It was game over by half time as Town were down 3-0 thanks to goals from Reyes Cleary, Patrick Kelly and Luca Connell, which saw the visitors booed back to the changing room, but their woeful performance continued from the restart as the hosts, who only needed 31 per cent of possession, continued to turn the screw.
An own goal from Gideon Kodua made it 4-0 and then the division’s top scorer Davis Keillor-Dunn got in on the action to seal Luton’s heaviest defeat of the season and the second under Wilshere, who will now need to demand significantly higher standards in both courage and quality.
“[It’s] one we need to really look at, we need to analyse and quickly because there’s another game Tuesday,” Wilshere told LTFC+. “It’s probably a good thing, in my opinion, that we get to go again straight away. Maybe a little bit of a reality check for me, maybe for everyone.”
He insisted that effort wasn’t the issue, but ruthlessness and resilience were glaringly absent, adding: “The lads have given everything. They’ve given everything since we’ve come in and I definitely would say we tried today. They tried today. We have to be more ruthless. We have to take our opportunities early in the game.”
Wilshere admitted the match spiralled into something far more primitive than tactics or structure, saying: “When the game starts to go away from you, tactics go out the window and everything else goes out the window. And it’s about who’s going to fight, who’s going to roll their sleeves up. And we couldn’t do that, which we have to look at.”
That self-reflection will have to be rapid as Luton face the visit of Huddersfield on Tuesday night.
“The players are hurting more than anyone. I think we’ve got a really good group at looking in their own mirror, and that’s very important,” he said after the travelling Town fans booed his team off the pitch.
“I can have a perception and I can look at players’ body language, but actually, they’re the guys that know when they get on the bus, when they get in their car on the way home, if they gave everything. And that’s all we can ask for.
“We know that’s not enough. There has to be more than that. There has to be more quality. We have to maximise our opportunities. When we get in the final third, we have to be better. Better quality into the box, better finishing quality. We have to keep working on that.”
Perhaps more than that, after a positive first five weeks in the job, Wilshere has now seen, in successive Saturday’s, his side fail to break down Rotherham last weekend but claim a third clean sheets on the spin, then see his side put in the kind of lacklustre and error-ridden performance that has been all too prevalent under his two predecessors for the last 18 months.
“We’re going to have to recover quickly to find some belief again. We worked hard on building the belief, building the confidence, and we’re still in that process. Things like this don’t help, but also sometimes it’s a reality check and it makes you wake up. I think we have to.”
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