Boss Matt Bloomfield admitted that Luton “can’t keep defying logic” as they squandered golden chances to claw themselves closer to Championship safety.
The Hatters took the lead, but wasted opportunities and then predictably got hit with a Plymouth sucker punch that extended their winless run to 11 games in the Championship.
All the evidence of this clash with Argyle is that the pair will soon be meeting again in League One, unless Luton can suddenly stop wasting chances. Lasse Nordås – on his full debut – Elijah Adebayo and Jacob Brown all squandered golden chances.
“I think we, underperformed our xG again, which we’re frustrated with. And our opponents over-performed it. And, that’s what’s resulted in the in the point rather than three,” said Bloomfield.
“But I’ll never criticise anyone for missing chances. It’s the hardest thing in the game to stick the ball in the back of the net.
“I just praised the character to keep getting in there. We’ve got to keep getting in there. We’ve got to keep taking chances. We’ve got to keep getting on the end of them.
“And if we do that and keep playing the way we have done the last two games, the points have to follow. We can’t keep defying logic in terms of the way we create chances. It will it will come our way, absolutely.”
This whole campaign has defied logic. Mathematically, Town are still in the fight for survival, but this chastening night against relegation rivals offered little hope that they can realistically remain in the league.
At least Jacob Brown’s 55th minute header ended a club record four home games without a goal. And it was his first touch, less 30 seconds after replacing the out-of-sorts Adebayo.
And for 15 glorious minutes, Kenilworth Road believed that the Great Escape part two was on the cards.
Then an injury forced defender Mark McGuinness temporarily to the sidelines, where one of football’s most pointless laws meant he had to watch as Argyle lump the ball into a penalty area he’d dominated to the huge frame of Maksym Talovierov. The defender out-jumped Amari’i Bell to head in at the back post. The law, frankly, is an ass.
Bloomfield said: “I think from they take it from when the ball comes back in play, it’s there’s obviously nuances to the rule.
“If the physio comes on then the player has to go for 30 seconds. But obviously if a player goes down, the game gets stopped, but it doesn’t get treatment as we saw multiple times tonight. They just carry on in the game, get stopped.
“So, yeah, it’s frustrating for us to concede when Mark is off the pitch. If he’s on, we have one extra defender in the box. But, I don’t want to make excuses. We’ve got to see out these moments. It’s crucial to winning games. Absolutely crucial. We limited, I’ve been told three shots to our opposition, of which that was one of them. So really frustrated to not win the game tonight.”
Deflation abounds. The Pilgrims, without a win on the road all season and just five league goals to their name away from Home Park, barely looked like scoring, apart from the goal they were denied in the first half when Callum Wright was wrongly flagged offside. It was a huge let-off for Luton.
Instead, they lumped ball after frustrating ball at centre halves that had kept Liverpool quiet in the FA Cup. But while their giant defenders mostly presented a domineering wall, they hadn’t conceded a league highest 66 goals for nothing and they offered up chances. Town just didn’t take them.
The biggest was Brown’s point blank header, which was arguably an easier chance than his first goal in almost three months, but he somehow managed to head into the ground and at Conor Hazard’s hands.
He should’ve been the hero here, but Luton just do not know how to win games and Bloomfield will take his basement boys to arch-rivals Watford on Sunday without a victory in his first seven games and just one win on the road all season, five long months ago. Time is now starting to run out.
Bloomfield said: “We wanted to win the game. I think we’ve done enough. We did enough to win the game. And we’re really frustrated not to have done so.
“Considering the amount of opportunities we created limited our opposition to very little. But, we didn’t, do the two boxes well enough to win the game ultimately. And we’re really frustrated by that.”
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