Hatters boss praises Luton's players for their response after being 'rocked' by Red Devils' lightning start

Luton boss Rob Edwards hailed his players for the way in which they were able to respond after being ‘rocked’ by Manchester United’s lightning start during this evening’s 2-1 defeat at Kenilworth Road.

With Town forced into a change ahead of kick-off, top scorer Elijah Adebayo pulling up in the warm up and Cauley Woodrow coming in, the hosts were hit by another huge blow just 37 seconds in, Amari’i Bell’s awful backpass seized upon by Rasmus Højlund who went straight through to beat Thomas Kaminski.

The Belgian was then fishing the ball out of his net once more with six minutes gone, Højlund again left unmarked from a corner to divert Alejandro Garnacho’s volley in for his second of the match, as Luton were already staring down the barrel of a heavy defeat. However, Carlton Morris halved the deficit with a quarter of an hour gone, heading home his seventh of the campaign, as with Kaminski in unbeatable form after the interval, it allowed the Hatters to push and push for an equaliser which they ultimately just failed to find.

Summing up his side’s character to remain in the contest, Edwards said: “Losing your number nine and then going one-nil down after 40 seconds is not an ideal way to start against Manchester United of course. I think it probably wobbled us and rocked us a little bit. One-nil turned to two-nil after about six minutes and you’re a little bit fearing the worst, and thinking ‘okay how are we going to respond to this?’

"I've got to give the players a lot of credit, they showed an air of calmness and belief, commitment to the gameplan and dragged themselves on to a really good performance. We got back into the game and then pushed and pushed, couldn't find the second one, but in the end there’s lots to like about the performance. But you can’t give a team like Manchester United a two-goal headstart that early in the game, we got punished with a couple of errors and it was hard to recover from that.”

Going through that opening 10 minutes, Edwards added: “There’s areas there we can work on, all right the first is human error, it won’t happen again, just one of those things. Second one, on the second phase, we step away from Højlund who’s on fire at the moment and a big, big threat, so that one we can fix.

"Then I thought we stepped on to a really good performance, a really good game. We’re playing against Manchester United, we’ve got to remember that, and remember that I'm feeling really disappointed as we fully believed going into this game we could win today, I really did. I think we showed that then in the performance after that first eight to 10 minutes where we were a little bit rocked with what had happened.”