Luton Town manager Jack Wilshere has aimed a thinly-veiled dig at Bradford City after the Bantams left Kenilworth Road with all three points yesterday.
The Hatters headed into the fixture with just one win from their last five league games and off the back of a 2-1 defeat at Stevenage in their last outing. It is a run that has left the former Premier League team already playing catch up in the League One promotion race, but yesterday represented an opportunity to get their season back on track.
Bradford arrived in Bedfordshire third in the table and hoping to improve on last season’s outing, where they were defeated in the play-off semi finals by eventual winners Bolton Wanderers. It was indeed the visitors who took an early lead through Bobby Pointon in the fourth minute.
Luton responded by dominating possession and although they went in at the break behind, Wilshere would have been encouraged by the first half showing. However, the second period proved to be a lacklustre affair and Graham Alexander’s men held on to move to the summit of the third tier.
Wilshere Disappointed But Points Out Bradford’s ‘Game Management’
The result left Luton rooted firmly in the bottom half of the table ahead of the international break, with the upcoming fixtures against Huddersfield Town and Doncaster Rovers postponed due to international call-ups. Speaking after the game, Wilshere admitted the result was tough to take:
“Frustrating, disappointing, a tough one to take as I thought in the first half we did so many good things. We arrived in the final third so many times, with what we spoke about doing pre-match.
“We probably could make those chances a little bit better and have more quality in the final third, but I thought there was an improvement from the last game (against Stevenage) where we made better decisions, we picked better passes, we were just maybe a little bit late or a bit too far in front of someone.
“Then in the second half I felt like we didn’t get going.”
Continuing, the 34-year-old delivered somewhat of a back-handed compliment to Bradford:
“We got sucked in a little bit to what they wanted, and they’re good at it. This is not me digging them out or saying anything bad about them, as we knew that going into the game, that they’re good at breaking up play, they’re good at delaying things, they’re really, really good at defending. They don’t concede many goals and I thought that we got sucked into that a little bit where we would try and win the ball where it was 70, 30, or 80, 20, then they’d go down and delay for 20 seconds.
“Then we started to build a little bit of momentum, build a little bit of a spell and then they do the same thing where they go down for two minutes and credit to them, they’re good at it. That’s game management, that’s experience, that’s game knowledge, and that’s the frustrating thing as the first half was good. We had something like 10,11 shots maybe and in the second half we didn’t have that, didn’t carry that same threat.”
Wilshere Must Use Break To Reset
With international football increasingly effecting League One, Wilshere now has the opportunity to have a rethink over the coming weeks. Aside from participation in the EFL Trophy, the Hatters return to league action against Wycombe Wanderers on October 10th.
It’ll be a fixture in which the manager has already identified as a chance to break their recent poor form and launch an assault on the top six. Despite sitting 16th, Luton are only three points off sixth-placed Oxford United and a good run of form would soon catapult them into the upper reaches of the division.
