Head coach Scott Brown spoke to the media after his side came back from behind to earn a point against Portsmouth at Fratton Park on Saturday afternoon.
The hosts put themselves into the lead early on through a Josh Koroma strike, but Town fought valiantly and pulled it back to level terms after Carlos Mendes Gomes scored his first goal for the club, converting Toto Nsiala’s pass from close range.
Here’s what the gaffer had to say after the game:
On the game as a whole…
“Coming back shows the lads’ mentality more than anything; for us to go 1-0 down after six or seven minutes, it shows their willingness and desire to get back into it like they did. They put their heads and bodies on the line and it’s those last-ditch contacts that earned up the clean sheet.
“A lot of teams could come here and go one-nil down early on and by half-time, they would find themselves already out the game so fair play to the lads.
“They all dug deep as coming to a stadium and playing in front of crowds like this will always be hard – they will always have momentum now and then. It’s about how you deal with that, and I thought our lads were exceptional at that.
On the impact of Carlos Mendes Gomes…
“Carlos [Mendes Gomes] has been great since coming in, he’s got a good relationship with Addy [Muskwe] as they have both been at Luton together. They’ve got a good understanding of what they want to do and have good positioning sense as well.
“We work on set plays a lot, so it feels good when stuff like that comes off for the goal. You’ve got to take your chances and one of the plays that we’ve worked on has worked today, which is great for us.”
On the work done so far by the squad…
“We worked on the defensive structure throughout pre-season, in terms of the shape of the team and when we lose the ball. We know we are going to lose the ball as we don’t expect people to have 100% pass success rate, but I feel we can keep the ball a bit better at times.
“That would minimise the risk factor that we put on the lads going forwards, but that composure comes from us installing that into the lads. For the goal, that’s probably on us, we want to play out from the back and put teams under pressure so maybe we should have gone longer in the first 10 minutes.
“We will learn from these mistakes and move forwards; It’s been a hard week because of the travel and the fact that we had another game three days ago, so we haven’t really been able to train much and get things organised, but the lads have dealt with that well - it’s been hard, but we’ve dealt with those situations well so far.”