Luton have been practising penalties for weeks just in case their play-off semi-final second-leg against Sunderland tonight goes a shootout.
The Hatters are down 2-1 after the first match at the Stadium of Light on Saturday, so they know that they have to win the game by two clear goals in order to progress to the Wembley final next week.
A solitary goal, however, will force extra time as the old away goal rule no longer applies, and if the two Championship rivals can’t be separated after 120 minutes then the clash would be decided from the spot.
While Sunderland sneaked into the play-offs of the final day of the regular season, Luton, who have only had four penalties all season, knew with three games to go that they’d qualified and so have been planning for all eventualities.
Asked if his men are prepared for spot-kicks, Edwards said: “Yes, of course. There’s obviously a chance it could go to penalties, so I think it would be silly of us not to talk about it, look at it, the process of the whole thing as well, from the final whistle all the way through to the final penalty kick.”
The manager added: “We were probably able to get a bit of a head start on a few of the other teams in this area, so we’ve looked into that over the last couple of weeks.
“We’ve used the youth team, we’ve used our own players, we’ve tried different ways of doing it, and we’ll see, if it gets to that point we’ll see. Hopefully, the work that we’ve done will be relevant.”
In their penalty success to win promotion from the non-league at the weekend, Notts County swapped their keeper late on for the penalty shootout.
Asked if he’s got any similar plans, Edwards said: “Not at the moment, but I won’t be giving too much away.”
While Luton are yet to overturn a first-leg play-off deficit in three attempts after losing the away match first, Edwards has ruled out Town’s six previous failures being a hoodoo that will affect his players and believes his Hatters can do the job this season.
“We’ve got 90-plus minutes to win a game of football and we’ve done that pretty well this season, we believe completely still,” he said:
We know it’s a difficult task, we know they are a good team, but we’re in the play-offs, we expect it to be a challenge. We didn’t think it was ever going to be a walkover or anything like that. We’re one-down going into the home leg, but we’re more than capable of winning this game of football.”
