Luton chief executive Gary Sweet has revealed that it was Mick Harford who persuaded him to extend an olive branch to Nathan Jones – but admits he should have done it sooner.
The Welshman yesterday returned for a second spell as manager, having left acrimoniously in January 2019, when he jumped ship to Stoke City.
Chief of recruitment, Harford, will take the role as Jones’ assistant for the final nine games of the Championship season, having stepped in when the 47-year-old left, guiding the club to the League One title.
When Graeme Jones was installed as manager from the start of this season, no-one could have predicted a global pandemic throwing into chaos all of Luton’s plans.
The crisis saw the former Belgium number two leave a month ago, along with three staff, to help cut costs. But now, with players back training and a date for the Premier League return set, it’s expected that the Championship will soon follow a path back to matches resuming.
And the changes that Town have faced in the two-and-a-half months since football was shutdown saw the 2020 Board’s stance soften over their former manager.
Sweet said: “I can be a little bit head-strong sometimes and have a little bit of a fault where I can be non-forgiving, so it needn’t taken Mick to twist my arm and nearly break it to pick the phone up to Nathan, I should have done it before.
“It’s taken a while, a number of weeks of engagement with Nathan over a period of time for us, firstly, to recover the position that we had. I think it’s generally well-known that I’ve been ignoring his calls for a long time, actually. It was always going to happen.
“Football is a small industry and, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of people in it but everyone knows everyone, and you can’t go in this game for very long with enemies.
“It was always going to be the case that we were going to meet and patch up those differences in some form. We didn’t know when that would happen and we didn’t know it would turnout like this, genuinely. It was just the right thing to do.
“At the point of time when Coronavirus hit us, we had a plan of keeping Graeme until the end of the season. I say until the end of the season, he had a long-term contract, but it would have taken a natural review period for us to restructure anything and everything within the club anyway.
“That’s not to say that any decisions were made. so, when Coronavirus hit us, then we considered this period as our closed season. So, Graeme’s departure was partly made for that reason, because it was a review period, but also for financial reasons.
“Going forward, Nathan is part of that restructure. And without going into the terms of the contract of any sort, we wouldn’t take this on if we were increasing the liability of the operations of the club right now.
“But what is important is that it becomes a lot easier if we are a Championship club next season , so we have to give ourselves the best opportunity to do that. So, if we just focus on these nine games and become a Championship game next season then many, many of our problems, not all, will go away.”
