Spring has arrived, and along with sunshine, budburst, bluebells and nesting birds something else is stirring in a previously gloomy corner of Bedfordshire, something nourishing and warming, novel but also faintly familiar: hope.
“The last couple of years it’s been a really tough place to be,” says James Shea, Luton’s longest-serving player. “We’ve lost a lot of games and once you get used to losing it’s hard to turn it around. And you can see we’re starting to turn it around. If you’d said when we were in the Premier League that we’d be in League One in 18 months’ time, people probably would have laughed at you. It’s been a combination of everything – things have gone against us, and we’ve been everyone’s biggest game … Momentum can work both ways, and we had momentum in going down. Hopefully we’ve turned that around and hopefully we’re on the way back up.”
Two years ago this weekend Luton were playing Manchester City in the Premier League. Back-to-back relegations later they sit 10th in League One. But they have lost one of their past 11 in all competitions, are three points off the playoffs and on Sunday head to Wembley for the Vertu Trophy final. There they face a Stockport side whose recent trajectory has been entirely upwards: they have won three promotions and three league titles in the past seven seasons and are five places above their fellow Hatters.
Luton’s uplift can be traced to the arrival in October of Jack Wilshere as manager, for all that they have risen only one place since his appointment. “He’s changed everything if I’m honest,” says Kal Naismith, their captain. “There’s no getting away from it, we were in a low place. We had a poor start to the season, we’d had a poor run of results and were low as a group, lacking a bit of confidence, lacking a little bit of belief in each other. The manager came in and just sort of gave us all a hug, reminded us all how good we were, and then it was: ‘Right, let’s get to work.’ Now you can definitely see that we’re picking up.
“After seeing the way him and his staff work over their first three or four weeks, I knew this was coming. Wow, the detail. You see players that have played at the top, top level and it doesn’t necessarily make them great managers. You just never know. But the gaffer’s got an incredibly bright future in terms of the managerial side of the game. Just how he sees the game and how he feels, his human connection with players. There’s been plenty of times this year when he could have turned his back on me or had a go at me but he sort of knew how to manage me, knew what I needed, and I’ve seen him do it with so many other players. I feel he’s just going to take this club all the way. He’s certainly going to the very top.”
Luton’s last game before Wilshere’s appointment was in the group stage of the Vertu Trophy, against League Two Cambridge. They lost 3-1. “We fielded probably our strongest possible team, and we were nothing that night,” says Shea, a 34-year-old goalkeeper – and teammate of Wilshere’s in Arsenal’s 2009 FA Youth Cup-winning side – who has played only once in the league this season but every game in the Trophy. “Cambridge made a load of changes, it was basically their second string, but they battered us. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any lower, it did. That was probably the lowest moment since I’ve been here.”
It was not Luton’s only defeat in the competition, and the one truly unusual thing about their progress to the final is that it has been achieved despite getting knocked out in the last 16. They were beaten 2-1 by Swindon in a game that featured a long interruption in the second half when Swindon attempted to bring on their top scorer, Aaron Drinan, despite his name not being on the team sheet. “That was mental, it was really, really weird,” says Shea. “The game just stopped. At first I thought something was wrong with the referee. I walked over and the ref was looking at us, he didn’t know what was happening. Ian Holloway [the Swindon manager] was like: ‘Oh, we’ll just take him off and carry on.’ But the ref said we were just going to [play] on, and let the competition decide what happens.” Holloway later admitted it was “a major whoopsie”, compounded when it turned out that their captain, Ollie Clarke, was playing despite being suspended. Luton were duly reinstated.
Shea describes Sunday’s game as “a little distraction which we can enjoy” before attention switches to their last five league fixtures and their primary goal of a place in the playoffs and promotion. “Who knows, it could be our greatest season ever,” says Naismith. “We could be at Wembley twice and lifting two trophies. We’ve been through a lot this season. I know we’ve not always performed well but there’s a lot of emotions in football. We’re only human and we’ve had a lot of down days, a lot of tough days, and we kept at it and kept working hard. The fact that we’re here now, I’m just desperate to have that joy with the players, have that joy with the staff. I think we deserve it. But it’s easy me saying it, we’ve got to go out there and perform. Then we’ll look to the run-in and of course the dream will be to go back to Wembley and do it again.”
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