Oh gawd, is it really that time again? It’s Luton Town indoors and it’s much like hosting a child’s birthday party (probably) – you don’t want a bunch of noisy brats running around your living room and making a mess, but you don’t have a choice in the matter. The only hope isn’t that we’re sending the Hatters back to the Bedfordshire hinterlands with a party bag containing three points.
We can’t even begin to relish this match. Don’t kid yourself – it could be brutal.
Stevenage v Luton Town: Preview
Let’s start with our dismal home form against this lot. We’ve let them through the front door four times over the years – whether we wanted to or not. And what do we have to show from it? Four defeats and a kerfuffle – the lesser-known, not-at-all-successful Richard Curtis romcom. It doesn’t matter that we’ve lost all four by a single goal, we’ve lost them. And that’s the bottom line.
“Yeah, but we’d never beaten Wycombe at home until recently”
Hmm. OK. It’s as convincing an argument as we’re going to get. Not least because current form doesn’t give us much hope either. Luton are the league’s best when it comes to scoring on the road, with 18 goals in eight trips. No-one has kept a clean sheet when they’ve turned up. You see that child’s birthday party analogy is back in the room – those parties always need cleaning up after.
Overall, the Hatters’ away form is reasonable enough – four wins and three defeats. It’s their mediocre home form that keeps ’em rooted in mid-table. Us? Well, our home form is even less to write home about with three wins and four defeats from eight games. We’re without a league win in four attempts and the worst case scenario is that we sit third bottom when Sunday morning arrives.
Stevenage v Luton Town: Bookies?
The bookies are playing it safe from what we can tell. You’ll find Luton going around at 11/10 to make it five wins at the Lamex in five, while we’re 11/4 (Bet365). You can get 28s on Boro’ to lead at half time and trail at full time, with Jamille Matt 12/5 to score on debut this weekend. You pay your money, you take your chance – that’s how it’s always worked with these kind of things.
In the virtual world where it can all be sorted with a swift restart of the PlayStation, our FIFA 16 predicticast saw Luke Gutteridge put the visitors ahead against the run of play with a spawny goal. Things weren’t looking great for us as the game wore on, but the man Arnand saved our skin with a piece of late magic. We took a draw in the end – and probably would do so again this weekend.
BoroGuide’s Luton Town club profile – it’s better than actually visiting Luton