Luton chief always felt Collins could cut it in the Championship

Town boss Nathan Jones always felt that striker James Collins could make a name for himself in the Championship.

The 29-year-old forward managed 14 goals during his first campaign in the second tier, ensuring the Hatter were in a position to avoid relegation on the final day.

He is already backing that up this term, with a hat-trick against Norwich in the Carabao Cup last weekend and then blasting a brilliant winner as Town defeated Barnsley 1-0 on Saturday.

Prior to signing for Luton from Crawley Town during Jones’ first spell in charge back in the summer of 2017, Collins had spent five and a half of his eight years as a pro in League Two, with just 18 months in League One for Shrewsbury and a solitary Scottish Premier League campaign when at Hibernian.

Also now capped by the Republic of Ireland, Jones said of his talismanic forward, who has 63 goals in 141 games, sitting 17th in the club's all-time scoring list: “That’s why bought him here, that’s why we paid a lot of money for us and for him, we put a lot of faith in him and he’s responded.

“He’s a very diligent finisher, he takes everything seriously.

"He doesn’t mess about in training, finishing drills, the work he does on his own, in games and training, or whatever level, he’s taking pride in his finishing and it’s no coincidence that when he gets opportunities, he takes them.

“I think it’s well known what he was, he was a perennial promotion winner or a League Two leading goalscorer, that's what he was, but I always felt he was far more than that.

“He usually got promoted out of League Two and then went back to one of the best ones in League Two, ironically he did that with us, but I felt there was much more to come.

“He’s a big player for us and he knows it.

"We have real good attacking pedigree here with the competition we have in terms of himself, Danny Hylton, Harry Cornick, Elliot Lee.

“We’re delighted with him, we brought him in to score goals from day one, literally, as he got his hat-trick on the first day (against Yeovil Town) and that’s what he does, so we’ve been very pleased with him.”

The stats showed at the weekend that Collins has now scored from his last four shots on target, or five from five if you include his penalty against Blackburn on the final day of last term.

It was something echoed as a team, with from Luton’s last 24 shots on target, 16 have ended up in the back of the net.

Jones continued: “To have a clinical edge, you need that.

"I’ve suffered in the past with not having clinical frontmen or not being clinical in front of goal.

"The XG (Expected goals), as they call it, was very high, but the points return wasn’t.

“So I’m pleased, we have players that can score goals.

"James is one that is clinical but everyone has to chip in with that. #

"We’ve always got a goal in us and now we’re proving to be a difficult side to beat, we have the chance of gaining points and not being in a similar position to where we were last year.”

Although Collins was top scorer last term, under previous boss Graeme Jones he was often utilised far wider than he would have wanted, with new boss Jones getting back to the more central berth he had success with at Kenilworth Road during his two seasons.

The Town chief added: "He knows what we want from him, he always has, I don’t think anything has changed.

"We brought him because we had a lot of players at the club that had movement, Hylts does pretty much everything in terms of running, in terms of chasing, assists and things but what we lacked at the time was someone to score the simple goals or the goals that we weren’t scoring.

"We would score from distance, we would score wonderful goals, we scored from counter attacks and stuff but what we wanted is a goalscorer who scored a lot of his goals inside the box and James can score every type of goal.

"He scores headers, he scores penalties, he scores from corners, shots from outside the box, but he really adds a lot to us in terms of being in and around the six-yard box.

"That’s what we brought him in for, so nothing has ever changed.

"His goal record has not been diminished at any level, the first year he got 20, second year 19.

"He’s had such a good record with us that we’ve always played him central so in this system, it’s even more key that he does stay central, but we never really changed that.

"I’d tell him to get in the box but he knows that from the work we do because he’s a goalscorer, we don’t want him crossing for someone else because he’s as good as we have in the box, we like him to get in there.”