Still: Individual errors are costing us badly

The Town chief could only watch on in frustration as his side were beaten 3-0 by Newport County on Saturday with keeper Mark Tyler at fault for the second and third goals.

Still felt it had been a similar defensive display to Tuesday night’s 4-3 defeat at Carlisle as Still said: “It was a bit like the other night really as I thought we were in control and don’t think Mark had anything to do until they scored.

“The keeper’s made a couple of good saves for them, but I thought we were in control. We switched off from a free kick, they’ve scored, but then we’ve just switched off and I don’t want to blame Mark, it’s not fair because Mark has done brilliant, but a mistake after a mistake and it led to to the defeat.

“It’s not the mistake or the two mistakes, it’s a bit like the other night, where we’ve let a goal almost affect the team performance, that’s how I saw it.”

The speed at which Town capitulated, conceding three times in 23 minutes, with Tuesday seeing three goals shipped in just 14 minutes is a clearn concern for Still as he continued: “Our problem, 100 per cent is we concede and we don’t just concede, we concede too quickly afterwards.

“We’re 1-0 down, okay we’re 1-0 down, no problems, let’s just work our way back into the game, and we didn’t give ourselves the opportunity to do that because of individual errors.

“That isn’t aimed at Mark Tyler because he’s been brilliant, the errors were from him, it could have been someone else and has been someone else, so it’s not just one person.

On why Hatters’ defending has got so bad after a run of three successive league clean sheets, he added: “Honestly, I haven’t got an idea. I looked at the goals back the other night and they were a little individualistic as they were here.

“That’s always the difficult one. The organisation you can work on, but if I’m a person who lets the ball slip under my foot, or misplaces a pass and they score from that, you can’t coach that.

“That’s the disappointing thing as the two games we’ve played, we’ve been in two positions and at a crucial time we’ve made an error and resulting in that error, really that’s been the end of the game.”

Still admitted he hadn’t see the result coming at half time after believing Luton were the better side, adding: “I didn’t feel that in the first half, we had any problems.

“We spoke at half time and said that we felt the longer game went on, as long as we stayed solid, we’d find some areas to exploit.

“I heard John (Sheridan, Newport boss) next to me when he made the changes, he said ‘we’ve got to change something as we’re hitting our head against a brick wall.’

“They were, and I thought we could push on and the last 20 minutes would have brought Craig (Mackail-Smith) on, taken the game and give ourselves the opportunity to win.

“But we never gave ourselves a chance to do that. We switched off from the free kick and from that minute on we never looked like the team we had done in the previous hour.”