Luton chief claims enforced break after Seagulls defeat has been a positive one for the Hatters

Luton chief Rob Edwards believes that Town’s break from Premier League action will have been a positive one for his players ahead of this evening’s trip to Chelsea.

The Hatters had kicked off their top flight campaign with a 4-1 defeat at early leaders Brighton & Hove Albion on August 12, before having to postpone their home contest against Burnley in a bid to get Kenilworth Road ready to host top flight action.

That saw the other 18 clubs all get another game under their belts, while bar a 3-0 friendly defeat to Arsenal, Luton's squad were confined to working on the training ground on those 13 days.

However, that allowed them to right some of the early wrongs that appeared at the Amex Stadium, as Edwards said “I feel really positive, we had a really good couple of weeks, as we took a lot from that game.

“If I’m speaking really open and honestly, you can watch as much Premier League football as you want, but until you’re actually in it, or until you’re on the sidelines like I was, or the lads are in it and they feel it, nothing quite prepares you for that.

“We were able to take a lot from that game, and we did see, I did see, lots of good things, but there are areas we’ve got to focus on and got to improve on very, very quickly.

“Because what’s really evident now is there’s a lot of killers in this league.

"Where they’ll see space, they’ll take it, and they can find that pass, so you can’t leave those gaps and we did a little bit too much in the first game.

“We’ve worked really, really hard to improve, we’ve had a lot of new players come in as well, so it’s given us another 12, 13 days to prepare, get other people up to speed and help them to gel in the group as well.

"So actually I think the break has been really good for us to reflect, learn quickly, really have an impact and act on it in training as well.

"I’m hoping that we see improvement, I’m pretty sure we will do.

“Now we’ve really seen it and felt it, we’ve got to push harder, which we’ve been able to do over the last couple of weeks as well.”

One of the main things that Edwards picked up from his opening 90 minutes as a top flight manager was the manner in which Town were picked apart during the latter stages of the contest as Brighton went through to score twice more and put a gloss on the overall scoreline.

Another was a lack of threat at the other end, Carlton Morris seeing his header well saved by Jason Steele, although the forward did get off the mark with Luton’s first goal in the Premier League when converting a penalty.

The boss added: “We’ll concentrate on us, trying to be the best us we can be, while completely respecting the league and the opposition we’re coming up against now.

"We want to try and be us, but we know that the us from last year is going to have to change a little bit.

"We were happy at times not to have the ball as much last year in the Championship, we know that’s going to be the case again this year, but we’ve got to be better in a lot of moments now.

"We’ve got to do the basics even better, we’ve got to close the spaces even better, we’ve got to be much more devastating in transition when we can be.

"We had good moments of that against Brighton, but then we lacked that killer bit, so there’s areas that we know we can improve in.

"We’ll concentrate on what we can control, and people can make what they want of all the touchline stuff and the mind games, but that stuff’s not for me, I’ve just got to focus on us.”