Sonny Bradley admits that find a first clean sheet of the Championship campaign is the first thing on his mind, after Luton conceded three for the second time in two weeks.
The Hatters enjoyed 23 shutouts in all competitions last term, but a 3-0 defeat at home to Hull City on Saturday confirmed them as the leakiest defence in the second tier, with 16.
Manager Graeme Jones has made a point of saying he’s not concerned with clean sheets, as long as his side can win games but they’ve now lost two in a row to leave them one place and two points above the drop zone.
But for centre back Bradley, there’s no getting away from what he craves the most.
“That’s the first thing on my mind now, every week, trying to chase a clean sheet,” he said after the defeat to his hometown club, Hull.
“We really wanted that but the difference is, we’re trying to chase the game, trying to win and when you’re doing that in this division you can leave yourself open.
“With Hull and the quality they have, if we don’t score we know we’re going to concede at least a couple of chances in the game. Fortunately for them they converted them.
“We’re conceding too many goals at the minute, there can be no harking away from that.
“We’ll really have to look at that and see where we’ve gone wrong, because if we keep conceding that amount of goals then we’re going to find ourselves dropping down the table rapidly.
“We’ve got a task now, trying to sort that out, but when we do, I think we’ll always score goals, apart from today (Saturday).”
Prior to Bradley facing his old side, Luton had combined their defensive frailties with the joint highest goalscoring stats, with 12 and the defender said: “But we’re going to score goals. We’ve shown already this season that we have got it in us, from all over the pitch, to score goals.
“At the minute we’re conceding too many goals and it’s costing us.”
Town players were back in training yesterday to prepare for tomorrow’s Carabao Cup visit of Premier League Leicester City.
Boss Jones spent Saturday night trawling through the tapes of the Hull defeat and Bradley said: “We will have to analyse it because it’s quite clear that we’re conceding too many goals at the minute. There is a problem somewhere because we are conceding too many goals.
“We need to address that, we need to take responsibility, which I think we will. We have honest players at this football club, so we just need to recognise where we’re going wrong a make it work.”
