Luton Town are setting their sights higher than a relegation dogfight as James Collins says the Hatters have no excuses in their second Championship season.
The striker signalled his intent with the second fastest hat-trick in English football this year to dump Norwich out of the Carabao Cup on Saturday.
Collins bagged a treble on the opening day of the season three years ago on his Luton debut and that season saw the club win promotion from League Two.
“I remember that game really well. It was my debut for the club, so if the season can end up like that one, obviously we’ll all be very happy.”
After an unusual League Cup start to the campaign, league action starts at Barnsley on Saturday and, like the Tykes, Town left it until the last day of the season to pull off a remarkable Great Escape. It’s drama that Collins is not keen to repeat.
“We’ve got our own in-house targets and we know that we need to perform better at a times than we did last year, and not leave it to the last 15 games,” said the striker.
“You’ve got to remember that last year was our first crack at the Championship, so we were new to it. This year, we’ve got no excuses, really.
“We know all about it. We know how tough it is, so we need to make sure everybody’s at it, whoever plays, and hopefully be more successful.”
In taking 16 points from a possible final 27 after the Coronavirus lockdown, Luton finished last term with play-off form to avoid a quick return to League One, but they’d began to turn a corner before the global pandemic struck.
Collins said: “We want to continue what we did at the back end of last season. We had a bit of momentum there and we showed really good form in the last 15 games, so we know that we need a good start this season and winning (on Saturday) can only help that.”
Collins has finished as top scorer in each of his three seasons at Kenilworth Road and scoring goals from the squad were not a problem last term, but conceding them was, as they had the worst goal difference in the division until Hull finished worse off on the final day.
The Hatters kept six clean sheets in the final 15 games of the season and didn’t concede in a four-game truncated pre-season campaign – albeit against lower league opposition – and Collins knows that’s the key this term too.
“I think that started from the back end of last season as well. We were keeping a lot more clean sheets and we were a lot better as a team, defensively,” the striker said.
“That’s how you win games. If you don’t concede goals, we always know we have goals in the team. That’s a credit for the lads that worked from the back end of last season and brought it into pre-season.”
