Luton boss blasts Qatar World Cup scheduling for 'watering down' the quality of the Championship

Hatters boss Nathan Jones believes the quality of the Championship has taken a huge hit by the amount of games having to be crammed in ahead of the World Cup being held later this month.

By the time the campaign pauses for the tournament held in Qatar, which starts on November 20, Luton, and the rest of their second tier counterparts, will have played 21 games in just under four months, with seven midweek matches after the campaign started a week early this term in a bid to fit all the fixtures in.

They then come back on December 10 to complete the remaining 25 games, only scheduled to play four midweek matches in the second half of the season.

With Luton struggling with injuries once more this term, Cauley Woodrow, Reece Burke and Luke Berry all absent in recent weeks, plus Pelly-Ruddock Mpanzu and Fred Onyedinma, they have only taken two points from their last three matches, after draws with Sunderland and Reading at Kenilworth Road.

Jones pointed to Tuesday night’s clash with the Royals as a perfect example of just how the standards have slipped slightly, saying: “It was a typical Championship game on a Tuesday night in November with games coming thick and fast.

“That’s why because of the World Cup and the congested fixtures, the quality sometimes gets watered down.

“We’re losing people to injuries, they had injuries tonight, and it’s just the integrity of the competition gets questioned because of this World Cup.

“It's just watering down a top, top league because there’s too many games because some idiot’s made a World Cup in the middle of November.

“You’ve got Saturday, you’ve got Tuesday and then you’ve got Saturday again, you’ve just got to keep going, patching stuff up and then just getting into the break.

“All you’ve got to do is get to the break.

"If you get to the break then you’re going to be fine, but just too many fixtures, too much congestion, too much pressure on the players physically and something’s got to give and it just waters down the competition.

“It's unfair really because of someone wanted to play a World Cup in November, for whatever reason, in the hottest place on earth, so they might as well have just played it on the sun in June, because there’s no difference."

Luton are in the middle of their second successive three game week as they head to Blackpool on Saturday, then travel to Stoke City on Tuesday night before entertaining Rotherham United next weekend.

With that in mind, Jones took both Carlton Morris and Jordan Clark out of the starting line-up in midweek, the former coming off the bench in the second half.

He added: “You either rest him or you risk injury, we can’t do that, plus he’s on four bookings.

“The games are coming thick and fast, we’re not able to rest, we're missing big players as well and having to play people out of position, so it takes away a lot from us.

“People like (Allan) Campbell and Clark have just had to grind out game after game after game after game and it’s just taking its toll.

“Our performance levels have been watered down just because of the fixture schedule and because we’ve picked up injuries to key positions.

“It was good to see Berry, good to see Pelly-Ruddock back which eases that as we’re going to need those.

“It’s a ruthless schedule, we go into an international break where everyone can get back up to speed and then we can go again.”