Luton’s miserable away day record stretched to seven games without a victory thanks to a five-minute double from Cardiff City just before half time, as Town boss Jack Wilshere was left questioning whether his side showed enough collective belief to battle the League One leaders.
Having recovered from David Turnbull’s opener when Isaiah Jones won a penalty that Jordan Clark converted, the Hatters were undone by two quick-fire goals from Joel Colwill and Perry Ng, which Town could not recover from.
Wilshere also felt his side were on the wrong end of a big refereeing call, believing Joel Bagan’s foul on Jones to concede the spot-kick should have resulted in more severe punishment than the caution the defender was shown for attempting to play the ball.
“The ref said to me that, the rules changed. That’s subjective in my opinion, because I’ve been a player in in certain moments where you know that you can’t get the ball and you just try and make a foul. So yeah, frustrated. But we still have to do more.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, Wilshere spoke about the courage his men needed to show. Despite acknowledging the quality of the league leaders, he was clear that his players had not fully delivered on what had been asked of them, particularly without the ball.
“We have to have more belief,” he told the BBC. “We spoke about that before the game, about courage. Courage shows up in different ways and I don’t think there was probably enough collective courage to try and do the things we spoke about. And then we gave goals away which which at any level is difficult to come back from.”
Away form is now an obvious concern for the Luton manager, who admitted it is an issue he must solve quickly with another trip looming on Wednesday at Wigan.
“Clearly there’s there’s an issue away from home which I have to find the answer to,” said Wilshere. “We have to look within ourselves, within the dressing room and find out what it is, because we were coming here full of confidence.
“Away from home, we have to cut out there moments where we don’t recognise the importance of keeping the ball, the importance when you do regain it, of maybe just having a spell, especially against teams like this, to take the sting out of the game to kill their momentum a little bit,” he said. “We’ve done that a lot to teams this season where we’ve recognised their moments, but away from home, we can’t do it at the moment.”
Despite not conceding more goals in the second half in south Wales, the Hatters barely laid a glove on the Bluebirds.
Wilshere said: “They were obviously trying to hold on to something and we didn’t have enough threat. We didn’t have enough shots. We didn’t have enough moments where we just put the ball into an area. And when we did, we didn’t really look like we were going to score. So, yeah, tough day.”
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