After Luton secured promotion from League Two last season their defender Alan Sheehan made some bullish predictions. “The manager has built this squad for League One,” he said. “We’re not going into League One fearing anybody. We’ll go into every game thinking we can win it.” Nathan Jones, the Luton manager, declared his side were “ready for the next league and that’s the best thing about it”.
And so it has proved. Though Sheehan has not made the step up so convincingly – a mainstay of that promotion push he has been largely confined to the bench, starting three league games – his team have continued to excel. They find themselves five points clear at the top with eight games to go and unbeaten in more than five months.
This is despite the departure of Jones, who left to join Stoke in January. The former Luton striker Mick Harford, who had been working as the chief recruitment officer, was installed as interim manager and they have won eight of 12 league matches, drawing the rest.
The secret to their continued success under new management is simple: Harford has changed nothing. Ten of the players who started their most recent game, against Gillingham last Saturday, also started Jones’s final league game against Barnsley on New Year’s Day – and that solitary change was enforced because of an injury to Alan McCormack.
Since Harford took over the same players, in the same formation and using the same approach, Luton have continued to get similar – if slightly improved – results.
“I hardly watched the first team while Nathan was the manager,” says Harford. “Very occasionally, maybe a cup game or something. But I used to be on the training ground every day. I watched the players train, I was involved in the process of bringing the majority of the players to the club, and I knew when Nathan left that the team didn’t need fixing. There was nothing wrong, we were doing well. So we just carried on and we didn’t really change much.”
Sonny Bradley was signed from Plymouth last summer and since breaking into the team in August has played every minute of every league game at centre-back. “After the manager left we didn’t know what was going to happen,” he says. “As a group of players we just stuck together and continued doing what we’d been doing all season.
“We were flying in the first place so we didn’t want to change too much and Mick gave us the chance to keep things as they were. Mick knew what we were about, he knew what we wanted to do, he’s kept it the same and we’ve continued to do really well.”
There is a pleasing circularity to their rapid rise. Ten years ago, Luton, with Harford in charge, were relegated for the third season in succession, dropping out of the Football League having failed to overcome a 30-point deduction for a combination of illegal payments to agents and administration irregularities. That October, with the team struggling to impose themselves in the Conference, Harford was sacked.
David Wilkinson, the club’s chairman, was part of the consortium that rescued the club from administration. “In our first full season we were in the Conference, fans expected to beat everybody, all the decent players had gone and we had to get rid of Mick, who is a club legend,” he says. “It was the worst day of our lives having to do that. To see it turn now, when we’ve got a chance of promotion to the Championship with him in charge, it’s tremendous.”
Two weeks ago, Luton received planning permission for a mixed-use scheme at Newlands Park, which will allow them also to construct a new stadium at Power Court. After surviving administration, three relegations and five seasons in the Conference, the impression is of a club being restored to buoyant health on and off the pitch.
“As a club we are in a good place,” says Harford. “There’s a process to that. There’s not one person that’s responsible. You start near the top with the board and you move on to the players, the staff, the fans. Everyone’s made a contribution. It’s been a lot of hard work to get where we are and we’ll cherish it and keep working hard.”
Not only is it five months since Luton have lost in the league, in that time they have been behind only twice, an experience they last endured for 51 minutes at Sunderland more than two months ago. “We very rarely concede the first goal,” says Bradley. “That’s massively important in a football game. For the style we play, if we go out and score the first goal it means teams can’t sit in and they have to come out and chase the game, which then opens up more space, more gaps, and that’s what we like to exploit.”
Bradley is convinced the side can survive another step up – “I think we’d have competed in the Championship this season” – but for now his focus is on more immediate concerns. “You don’t know when you’re next going to be part of a team this good,” he says.
“After games, the feeling of winning is unbelievable. A couple of weeks ago we played Bradford on a Tuesday night. It was a really tough game and we ground it out, and we couldn’t hold it in after the game. It was such a powerful feeling. Once you experience that you want it every week, and for a long time now that’s what we seem to be doing.”