Town have been without a lot of players again this season.
Matt Bloomfield, the new manager of Luton Town, prioritises fixing the club’s ongoing injury issues.Town’s record of absentees during the calendar year 2024 severely hampered any chance of remaining in the Premier League, as predecessor Rob Edwards was frequently without double figures of senior players, forcing him to go into top-flight matches with two goalkeepers and a handful of untested teenagers on the bench.
That bad luck has continued this season, with the Hatters once again missing a slew of players who have hampered their Championship campaign. Bloomfield was without Teden Mengi, Reece Burke, Shandon Baptiste, and Tom Lockyer for Tuesday night’s trip to Oxford United, with all three out for varying lengths of time.
Although he was able to welcome back Alfie Doughty from a two-month absence, recent addition Lamine Fanne was also unavailable with an ankle problem. When discussing the injury situation, Bloomfield said: “It’s something I knew coming in and something I’ve been made even more aware of since working in the building and realising some of the injuries are longer term and they’re not going to be with us for a little while,
That bad luck has continued this season, with the Hatters once again missing a slew of players who have hampered their Championship campaign. Bloomfield was without Teden Mengi, Reece Burke, Shandon Baptiste, and Tom Lockyer for Tuesday night’s trip to Oxford United, with all three out for varying lengths of time.
“I think that the medical staff and the sports science staff are absolutely fantastic from the work that we’ve done together and from my awareness is there’s been lots of mitigating circumstances and factors towards that. It’s not easy as a football club to have five and six big players unavailable. Of course that doesn’t help with results and I feel for Rob with the times that he’s had in missing big players.
“But there’s a squad that’s been built for a reason, we believe in the squad and we’ll be looking to pick up results while welcoming those boys back when they’re ready. There have been some big players missing for big periods of time, and that’s not ideal or helpful to build a winning football club or a winning team to miss some of your bigger name players, but we’ve also got some real good players in the squad that we’re working with.”
Although Luton are currently in a three-game week and the final stages of the transfer window, which could limit Bloomfield’s ability to change too much straight away, as soon as time permits, he will be viewing things in greater detail, continuing: “We’ll have to look at the training programme, the games schedule, the weekly schedule, how that’s made up, what the boys do on a day-to-day basis.
“I’m not here to try and rip everything apart that the guys have been doing as I think the medical and the sports science team are fantastic. In the interactions we’ve had so far, they’re really knowledgeable and they really care about their jobs. What you do know in football is there’s usually lots of things that go into the melting pot, there’s not just one contributory factor. So we’ll try and work the way we want to work, keep their ideas on board and we’ll come up with what we believe will be the right formula for the group.
“We’ve got a short period of time between now and the end of the season so it’s about trying to get through the games and keeping everyone fit and available. It will be naive of us to go after too many physical differences in the next week or two as we’ve got a midweek game, so your schedule is dictated to you, but once we get through that period, we’ll be looking to work the way we want to work and if we want to to adjust things slightly with their help and support then we’ll be doing that.”
Since Bloomfield has come in, he has still been unable to see the likes of Burke, Baptiste and Mengi in training just yet, but has still kept them close to the squad so they know just what is expected of them when they do come back into the fold, as he said: “They’ve been in every meeting as I think it’s really important that we keep those boys engaged.
“There will be some situations where injured players don’t join the meetings, but in the first instance of when we’re in the building, I think it’s really important that they understand who I am, who we are as a group of staff, what we’re going after on the pitch, so they’re engaged and we feel like when they come back, they will already have a base knowledge of what they’re going after.
“Unfortunately some of those boys are longer term. The group going out on the pitch, Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday have had to take the most focus, but I’ve had a good chat with Locks, a good chat with a few of the other boys, Burkey, so it will be good to make a deeper relationship with them as we find time.”
There are plans in place to help Bloomfield in his desire to improve the injury situation, as Town chief executive Gary Sweet revealed just how the extra finance from reaching the top flight has helped them in their bid to do so. Detailing the changes made off the pitch, he added: “Regards to injuries, it’s clearly something we’ve been concerned about for some time. It is something that’s happening across football, soft tissue injuries are on the increase, quite a lot and we put it down to a number of things here.
“One of the things we had last year was soft pitches at the training ground and we’ve put in a new half a million pound pitch, with proper drainage and a hybrid surface, so there’s a lot that we’re doing to correct that. So certain issues like this, the situation we had in December (Tom Lockyer’s cardiac arrest) creating a little bit of anxiety in the medical team.
“We took the opportunity towards the end of last season to restructure the medical team and really complete that process in the summer. We’ve got a really good medical team here, when you put something in place then it’s a little bit like when you make some changes to the academy, it sometimes might take a generation to happen.
“This is a good process where it’s a slow burning improvement, so over a period of the season we will see an improvement. We are actually seeing a number of improvements. When we get an injury, that period of absence is much shorter than they used to be, so actually there are areas of improvement, we’re just seeing the same level of injuries at the moment.
“We’re hoping we can improve that and hit the ground running next year when we’ve probably got a cleaner bill of health and as we started the season with three or four players out from the previous season, that was a difficult start and we just want to avoid that next season. You look back to assess where you might have made errors, or made mistakes, or had bad luck, or had situations such as the pitches, or whatever it was that contributed towards those injuries.
“We’ve changed a lot of people in the medical team and that’s not necessarily those that moved out or changed roles weren’t doing their job properly. We became a Premier League football club last season, that gave us the opportunity to elevate a number of areas of the club, whether that be in terms of facility or personnel. So we did that across the board, but with medical we made a real big difference with the number of physios and therapists that we had, not just the number, but in terms of their experiences and what they can bring and it’s working pretty well.”
