“Frustrated” Luton boss Matt Bloomfield has said his squad need to be fitter and more robust because they’ve have had “too many injuries” after the news that Marvelous Nakamba and Shandon Baptiste face six weeks on the sidelines.
Both midfielders suffered the same soleus injury in their calf muscles during the 2-0 derby day defeat at Watford and will now be missing until at least April, in a blow to Town’s Championship survival fight.
Luton as they face an uphill battle to avoid the trap door for a second successive season as, with 12 games remaining, they a rooted to the foot of the table on a run of 12 games without a win and effectively six points from safety due to the second worst goal difference in the division.
Ahead of tomorrow’s Portsmouth game, Bloomfield was more forthright than at any stage of his one-and-a-half month Hatters tenure and his focus was clear.
“We need to be more robust. We need to be fitter. We’ve got to be able to cope with playing the number of games that you need to play, and that has to be a focus for us moving forward because we can’t continue losing players on such a regular basis,” he said.
“We need to get fitter. We need to cover the ground quicker. We need to have more players that are available more often, so they can have a run of games and be ready to play with the robustness and the pace and the sharpness that you need.
“We can’t be managing players through games. It’s too important. You manage people through and then you losing them. It’s just not ideal.”
When he was appointed manager on January 14, Bloomfield inherited a squad that has been decimated by injuries for the best part of a year now. The treatment room had started to empty earlier this month, but for last Sunday’s derby day at arch-rivals Watford, he was missing key defenders Kal Naismith (hamstring) and Mark McGuinness (ankle), though the former is fit to face Pompey and Town are hopeful the former Cardiff man can play too.
Then, during that 2-0 defeat, Nakamba was hauled off at half time and his replacement, Baptiste only lasted 25 minutes before his body broke down, just two cameo appearances into his return from a near three-month spell out crocked.
“We want success and success looks like having players available more often,” said Bloomfield, who will be without his two senior defensive midfielders for a month-and-a-half.
“It’s a situation that we found ourselves in for the whole season as a football club. And we have to make sure we’re better at that because we need our players available more regularly, and we need to make sure that we can train as much as we possibly can and be as fit as we as we can be.
“We’ve had too many injuries. We’ve lost two players in the same game to muscle injuries. It’s not criticism of the medical staff or the sports science staff or us as training we’ve done. We ticked everything off we possibly can to make sure we protect our players. But it’s not easy to keep having to rotate players and change players because of injuries.
“We need to make sure that we have our players available, and we can train and we can play and we can win.”
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