Luton boss Rob Edwards has called for “fire” and “ice” from his Luton players if they are to topple Sunderland and reach the Championship play-off final in tonight’s must-win semi-final second leg.
Town are 2-1 down from a feverish first encounter at the Stadium of Light on Saturday where, despite taking the lead through Elijah Adebayo and dominating the first half, it proved a hard game for the visitors after Amad Diallo’s world-class leveller.
The Hatters also racked up four cautions, while Marvelous Nakamba was perhaps fortunate to have not been shown another yellow card in front of 45,000 supporters. Tom Lockyer also tangled with Joe Gelhardt in an early off-the-ball incident that referee Tim Robinson didn’t see, which saw the red mist descend on the captain for a few minutes.
Emotions will run high tonight and Edwards has called on Luton fans to provide a “wild” atmosphere inside Kenilworth Road, for everyone to be in their seats early and to make more noise than against arch-rivals Watford last month.
But asked if his Hatters need to show cool heads in their second-leg bid to overturn the score, the manager said: “We’ve got to be calm. We need 11 people on the pitch, but we need fire. We need to play with fire and then be ice cold at the right moments when we win the ball back, so we can keep it a bit better.
“If it does get heated at all, we’ve got to make sure we’re calm at the right moments, but we need to make sure, we play with real fire, like our lives depend on it.
“We don’t want this to be the end, but it could be our last game of the season and we don’t want that to be the case.”
Luton need to score once to at least force extra-time, so asked about getting the crucial first goal, Edwards said: “It’s important, but we’ve been very good at getting the first goal this season, probably as good as anyone in the league at getting the first goal.
“I suppose the more first goal’s you do get, you can get pegged back a little bit more than other teams as well, which happened on Saturday. In this particular game now, getting the first goal will level the tie up and then it’s back in the balance completely, so it will be important.
“It’s not the be-all and end-all, you can come back from two-down as well and you’ve got to keep believing right until the very end, but the first goal will obviously be key.”
Though Adebayo notched his first goal in 11 games at the weekend, he and his top scorer partner Carlton Morris were kept quiet in the second half at the Stadium of Light.
And on trying to feed the two forwards more, Edwards said: “It’s something that we’ve spoken about. We’ve spoken about it after the game, if you just go direct, direct, direct, especially on a big pitch, then you’re going to open up spaces for their good players because you’re not going to win everything, they’re going to win some second balls and you open up the pitch too much.
“I thought we did it really well in the first half, second half we were just not as good with the ball. If it did go into the frontmen, it didn’t stick as much. We know a few areas that we can improve in, but just because their defenders aren’t as big, it doesn’t mean they aren’t physical.
“They give as good as they get, that’s why they are where they are, they are good players but they’re physical and I think everyone’s playing on that fact that because we have a few tall players, it should be easy to lump it up and win every header, it’s not the case.
“They are physical in their own way, they’re strong, you can use any number of world-class players. Everyone knows that you don’t have to be big to be physical, quick, dynamic and strong. They’ve got all those attributes as well as being technically very good.”
