Rob Edwards admits his start to the season as Watford boss was like an ominously named Alton Towers rollercoaster, but that his switch to Luton came with belief and expectations – and he’s now on a play-off ride he doesn’t want to end tonight against Sunderland.
In the summer, fresh from winning League Two with Forest Green Rovers the 40-year-old was tempted to become the Hornets’ boss with a declaration from the the CEO of their notoriously trigger-happy hierarchy that they’d back him “come hell or high water”.
Eleven games later, and after just two defeats, Watford reverted to type and sacked Edwards. But little more than a month later he was installed as Nathan Jones’ successor at Kenilworth Road, becoming only the second man to manage both rival clubs.
A 2-0 victory over his former employers last month came as part of a 14-game unbeaten streak that saw Luton finish third in the Championship and secure a play-off place with three regular season games to go.
Tonight Town face a must-win second-leg tie at home to Sunderland after losing 2-1 on Saturday at the Stadium of Light.
Asked if he thought he’d be in this position in October when the Watford axe fell, Edwards said: “No, but I hoped that once I did get the (Luton) job, we really believed that we could do something. We talked about that last week.
“Now we’re here, we almost believed and expected to be in this position, I’ll be honest, with this group of players that we took over with.
“I’m not surprised, but when I got sacked, you don’t know if you’re going to get in again. You don’t know what type of opportunities you’re going to get, going forwards, so I’m pleased that I’m here.
“I think we probably all knew that Watford was going to end like that at some stage, and possibly quite quickly, a bit like the Oblivion, if you want to use the rollercoaster (analogy) if you’ve done that one at Alton Towers. So, it was a bit of that.
“It’s been a nice, steady incline since and hopefully it’s not finished yet.”
Edwards’ old side finished 17 points and eight places behind the Hatters, while he helped steer Town to their best-ever second-tier finish for 41 years. Now his task is to get Luton to recover quickly from their first defeat in 15 games and engineer Luton’s first-ever play-off success after six previous failures across the decades.
He said: “The togetherness is top. We’ve got an unbelievable spirit in the group. You can see that and I think you can hear it now. Just because we’ve lost one game of football, we haven’t lost since February to a penalty and it was against the league leaders who were the best team by miles. We played really well that day.
“We’re still confident. We’re still a half decent team and we can give anyone a game on the day. Just because we’ve lost once, doesn’t mean anyone’s going to drop their heads or lost any confidence or belief, or stating blaming or anything like that.
“The lads are with it, totally, and I’ve got total belief.”
