Brabin apologetic in defeat

Goals from Danny Wright and Dean Keates saw Luton trailing at the break, after producing one of their worst 45 minutes of the season according to the manager. He said: “It’s not an acceptable first half performance. Some of the decisions we’ve made definitely are not good enough and I just thought the Wrexham front three outmuscled us in the first half.

“We haven’t been able to say that too much this season with our back four but I thought that was the case. I call it fantasy football, it’s about defending properly our goal and threatening that goal and we didn’t do that.

“Yes we’ve we played some nice pretty football in patches, but we need some end product and it wasn’t good enough. There were lots balls into our box which we’re more than confident about dealing with as our whole back four has been rock solid. We should be bigger and better than that, the errors we made were very unlike us.”

Brabin hauled off Andre Boucard and Aaron O’Connor at half time, after Boucard was at fault for the second goal, handing possession to Keates who audaciously chipped Mark Tyler.

The boss conceded both were nursing slight knocks, but admitted he could have made several changes, while also praising the 167 fans who made the lengthy journey to Wales.

He continued: “At half time I could have taken any one of seven or eight players off. For the second goal, Andre was first to the ball, he knows we don’t take chances in the box and he’s passed it to their man.

“The support has been fantastic. They travel all this way to watch that first half performance and I apologise. I would say keep supporting us, someone from the top two is going to be very disappointed going into those play-offs and we’re still on course for our goal of achieving promotion.”

John Paul Kissock received a stoppage red time card for a lunge on Jay Harris and, although not defending his player, Brabin felt two dismissals would have been fairer.

He added: “JP, he just can’t tackle. We spoke to him about it and as soon as I saw it I knew it was going to be a red card. But for the opposition player to get up and take the law into this own hands, shoving JP in the face, I thought that was retaliation. I can’t defend our player, but I definitely thought there would be two red cards.”

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