Jones pleased with first look at Ince and Adebayo partnership during Lions draw

Luton boss Nathan Jones was pleased with his first viewing of the new-look forward partnership between recent signings Elijah Adebayo and Tom Ince during the 1-1 draw against Millwall on Tuesday night.

The pair arrived late on transfer deadline day earlier this month and were both given their first starts in midweek, Adebayo impressing throughout, capping a fine display with his maiden strike too, turning in Ryan Tunnicliffe’s cross at the back post.

Ince was a threat during his 75 minutes too, as playing just behind the former Walsall attacker he sent one shot that Lions keeper Bartosz Bialkowski flipped over the bar and demonstrated a constant desire to get on the ball and run at the visitors back-line.

Jones, who had dropped James Collins and Harry Cornick from the 3-0 defeat at Stoke City, said: “Ade gives us a different threat, a different dimension to others because of his size and the positions he takes up, so we’re happy with that.

“Whatever partnership we put up there we work on and we want to develop and want to get better, so we’ll see.

“But he’s (Adebayo) only just come into the building and been in the building three weeks, or whatever it is,

"He’s shown that he can step up to the level, but he’s still got a long way to go, so we won’t get carried away really."

Although Adebayo is only the second recognised forward to score for the Hatters this season, Collins on 10 the other, Jones was confident he has plenty of options available to him within the squad.

He added: "We’ve got different types of strikers here in terms of (Danny) Hylton, (Sam) Nombe, Collins, Cornick, one’s pace, some are target, some are workers, some are natural goal scorers.

“Whatever it is, we’ve got variation and we needed something different the other night as we haven’t been as fluent as we have, but we were excellent the other night.

“Millwall are a difficult side to play against so to have the level of control in the game we had, as normally it can be real crash bang.

"You look at the game we played them away from home, they were front foot, in our box, we had to change at half time because something was going to happen as they were really on the front foot.

"They weren’t able to do that the other night because we had a real good bit of control in the game.

"So it was a really, really encouraging performance and it’s a real pity that we didn’t go on and win the game.”