Winning promotion to the Premier League will be a bigger achievement for Luton than the first time Bournemouth did it, says Harry Cornick.
Now in his fifth season, the Town striker left the Cherries to join the Hatters in League Two and has helped fire the club to the Championship play-off places.
With six games left, Luton are in fourth place and facing a massive week against fellow promotion-chasers Huddersfield and Nottingham Forest. Ahead of all of them is second-placed Bournemouth, who are aiming to bounce back to the top-flight automatically, after missing out last season.
But in 2008/09, both the Cherries and Luton were in League Two and slapped with points deductions. Bournemouth received 17 points and managed to stay up, but Luton’s 30-point penalty proved too much to claw back and ultimately saw them relegated out of the Football League.
It took Town five years to get back into the EFL, meanwhile the south-coast club rose up the leagues to win promotion to the Premier League for the first time in 2015, spending five seasons there before falling through the trap door in 2020.
Both clubs could still reach the top flight this term, but if Luton do it they will become the first club ever to be relegated out of the top-flight (in 1992), down to the non-league and back up again.
Asked on the EFL Podcast if Luton winning promotion would “usurp” the achievement of Bournemouth, Cornick said: “Yeah, I think so. The resources we have compared to Bournemouth when they were in the Championship, they’re not comparable. It’s not the quality of players but the amount of money the players are on and the depth (of the squad).
“It is similar, how we’ve got from League Two, League One. We both got the points deduction at exactly the same time. It would be a massive achievement for us and would be very similar to what Bournemouth did, but I feel that, now, being part of Luton and more involved in the games, it would be so much more valuable.”
Despite two consecutive draws to Millwall and Peterborough, Luton are still firmly in the mix for the end of season shake-up and Cornick is enjoying the experience.
“It’s so exciting going into every game knowing how close we are to doing something special,” he said, adding: “No-one thinks we should be here. No-one thinks we’re going do it, but we can prove everyone wrong.”
And while progression on last season’s mid-table finish was the main goal for this campaign, now that Town are tantalisingly close to promotion, the striker insists it’s the only thing on Luton players’ minds.
Cornick said: “We think about it everyday I think. It’s what we talk every day. It’s what we think about every time we leave the training ground.
“It’s what we dream of, really, so why wouldn’t we talk about it? We talk about it when we’re playing, who’s in amongst us, checking the results. It’s huge for us, it’s huge from everyone.
“It’s a bit of shock to see us up there, but I think we’re good enough. If you look at the squad we’ve got, the way we’re playing, when we play against other teams, we don’t feel like we’re inferior to the big clubs around us. We feel like we deserve to be right in amongst in, so why not?”
