For Luton boss Matt Bloomfield, steering his Hatters away from the shadow of two consecutive relegations is not just about signing good players this summer but forging a united dressing room as the foundation for Town’s plan to climb back up the leagues.
After a hectic transfer window, where the club signed 14 players and saw the same number of senior stars leave, he’s now nearing the end of his first full fortnight of working with his new-look squad as he plots a path back to the Championship, with fellow relegated Plymouth Argyle up next.
Town went into the international break on the back of league and cup victories in which they found their shooting boots – with seven goals – while a fifth League One clean sheet in seven outings at Burton, and just three goals conceded so far, equalled the club’s best ever defensive start in as many matches of a Football League campaign.
One of his defensive new recruits, Cohen Bramall, was full of praise for the squad spirit that he’s now joined, and Bloomfield did not hesitate to underline how critical the off-field chemistry will be in achieving the club’s ambitions this term.
“I think it is absolutely crucial. I think it’s vital that you get a good blend of good people who are hungry to work, hungry to perform, hungry to have that competition of places, have a desire to play for our football club, have a desire to knit together as a group,” the manager said.
“I can’t overemphasise how big a part of the job I believe that is to get the right dressing room in place that is cohesive, that wants to work together, that it’s hungry for success.”
Bloomfield admitted the hangover from successive drops down the divisions shaped his summer planning, as only eight players remain from the Premier League campaign and five of them – Elijah Adebayo, Jacob Brown, Marvelous Nakamba, Teden Mengi and Joe Johnson – have been injured long term or haven’t featured this term, while James Shea, Mads Andersen, Zack Nelson only made one 11 top flight appearances between them.
Bloomfield said: “It was a big talking point for all of us over the summer, the fact of what’s happened over the last two seasons and what hangover does that leave on people as an individual, as a collective, as a group? The perception of the group as a football club, all of those things.”
That meant difficult conversations with players in the summer and a hard line on commitment and the manager stressed: “The desire to be elsewhere on a number of occasions that we wanted to accept and be respectful of, because, coming back to our group, we want people inside the building that want to be here and want to represent our football club. That’s just a bedrock of what we want to be as a football club. That’s the fundamentals, to have people here that want to be here.”
The manager believes his revamped squad is already showing the benefits of that focus.
“It was really important that we got that right. And I think we have to a degree. We’ve done as best as we possibly can, considering all the moving parts,” he said. “We’ve got a group that wants to be here and wants to fight together.
“So, hopefully, as a by-product of that, what’s happened over the last two years is has been removed slightly and we can just concentrate on the future because that’s the only thing we can affect.
“If you look at our results over the last period of time, to a degree we’ve picked up points and we want to keep picking up points because that’s how we build this new group to be the next era for our football club.
“That’s what our focus has to be on, is to build a new group that can represent this football club with pride and that’s our firm focus.”
The international break came as something of a blessing for Bloomfield, as the Blackpool game last weekend got postponed until the end of this month.
Talking about time on the training field with his squad, he said: “We’ve got some new faces and it’s just continuing that theme of integrating the guys, finding the way that fits the group, the style in the formation and trying to get everybody singing on the same board sheet and knowing exactly what we’re going after.
“With so many new faces, that’s not always easy to do. We didn’t have them all at the start and you go through that process, with people being dipped in and out throughout pre-season in the first few weeks.
“So we hope and we believe that as the season goes on, we’ll become more cohesive and the competition for places is obviously crucial as well.”
And now, two windows into his tenure at Town, having signed 11 players in January too, Bloomfield is starting to feel like this is his squad.
“It’s been a really big summer, in terms of ins and outs,” he said, adding: “There are nuances of when to sign players, what positions, who was leaving, when they were leaving and how they were leaving and for how much, et cetera.
“That was such a big process and complex process to go through, but we’re really happy with the squad we’ve got, we’re really pleased that the window’s now closed, so we can all settle down and we can just concentrate on the football, which is, for me, is really settling as well, because you know who you’re working with. So, yeah, we’re really pleased we’ve got.
“We’re really excited by the group we’ve got, and we’re just pleased that we can now just concentrate on the football.”
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