Hatters boss tells any uneducated Luton critics to 'choose your words carefully'

Luton boss Rob Edwards has told any uneducated critics of his side to ‘choose your words carefully’ after the Hatters chalked up their first Premier League win of the season when beating Everton 2-1 at Goodison Park on Saturday.

Having been written off by almost everyone outside of Bedfordshire before the campaign kicked off back in August, then having won promotion through the play-offs, Town started with four straight defeats, although three of them came away from Kenilworth Road.

It led to a number of pundits questioning the club’s position in the top flight, with one in particular, BBC columnist Garth Crooks going as far to say he couldn’t take them seriously and, bizarrely, that Town would be down by Christmas.

Although Edwards knows that the increased speculation is just something that comes with the territory of being in the top tier of English football, with Luton now showing signs of belonging, drawing 1-1 with Wolves and then winning on Merseyside, asked once more if feels there has been some disrespect shown so far, he said: “I might have used that word with one in particular, that’s for someone saying they can’t take us seriously.

“I think that is (disrespectful), but peoples opinions on whether we’re going to go down or whether we’re going to struggle, I understand that.

“I think it’s almost choose your words carefully in how you talk about us and most people should really maybe do their homework and have a little bit more respect for what we’re trying to do.

"It sounds like people are just rewarded for spending hundreds of millions, rather than actually, ‘oh, they’ve done it a bit differently and maybe they’re over-achieving a little bit, well done and celebrate it.’

"That being said, I think people said well done when we got promoted, people gave us the pats on the back.

"Now we’re in the Premier League we get judged as a Premier League team.

"Those standards are certainly higher now, so that’s up to us to show people we can compete.

“If you really want to go into detail you look at our last 15 years and you see where our club has come from and what it’s done and what as a football club we’ve achieved.

"Obviously that’s a lot of people before we joined last year, but I do feel if you actually watch our six games from Brighton to Everton, we have steadily improved.

"We performed better against Wolves than we did against Everton, we didn’t win the game, but we did against Everton.

"It just went for us on the day, but we have been improving, we have been getting better, that win has been coming.

"People are going to look at the top teams as they naturally do and just assume ‘they’re not great, that’s it.'

"Well that’s all right, that’s fine, we’ll just try and go under the radar.”

Luton’s six games so far at this level saw them start with a 4-1 defeat at Brighton, before losing 3-0 to Chelsea.

As they started to find their feet, the scorelines also demonstrated that fact, beginning to get closer when beaten 2-1 by West Ham and 1-0 against Fulham.

Town then finally registered their first point when drawing 1-1 with Wolves and followed that up with a maiden victory, Saturday’s 2-1 success at the Toffees.

On what has pleased Edwards the most in Luton’s brief top flight journey to date, he added: “I just think the players have learnt, they’ve learnt really, really quickly.

"We were probably not quite ourselves against Brighton and Chelsea, not all the way, just in moments.

"In games last year we were very resilient, very difficult to break down and in key times in both of those games, we were just too open and expansive.

"But we’re allowed to work it out a little bit.

"It was a new stage against very difficult opponents, but what I like is the players have really learnt, taken on new information and been able to put that into practice which is great.

"It doesn’t mean we’re just going to continue to keep picking up points all the time, but if we can get the performances right, it gives us a good chance.

“I have been banging on recently about our performances and we have been in the games, I like what we’re doing at the moment, the players deserve the credit.

"They’ll see it, they’ll see a lot of the doubters who will have their opinions and I get that, I understand it completely.

"So it's down to us to win games of football and get points to show people that we deserve to be here.”