Buckle: Fleetwood omission purely tactical

Buckle once again kept faith with Andre Gray and Jon Shaw up front for Tuesday night’s 1-0 defeat at Dartford, but Luton rarely threatened on a disappointing night.

However, Buckle felt his side should have had more than enough to get a result as he said: “We’ve got the best strikers in the division in my mind and I think they’ll come good.

“At the start of the season we were winning games away from home and struggling at home.

“That’s changed now. What we’ve got to do, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board, dig in away from home and find them solutions how to win again away from home.

“We came into the game positive, two wingers. Maybe at Telford away at 0-0 we lacked width.

“We had two very good wingers on the pitch tonight in (Scott) Neilson and Davey Martin and they got a lot of the ball. It wasn’t as if they were starved of the ball, they got a lot of the ball and the final ball wasn’t there tonight. But the one thing you do when you’re not having such a great day going forward is you don’t concede.

“It was an excellent goal, although I haven’t had a chance to see it again.

“We knew their wingers would come off of the line inside and (Jake) Howellsy’s shown him a bit too much respect and he’s bent it in the top corner.”

Shaw was withdrawn on the hour as FA Cup hero Scott Rendell was given a run out for the last half hour, but to no avail, while there wasn’t even a place on the bench for striker Stuart Fleetwood.

On his omission, Buckle said: “No major reason. We’ve got enough on the field for goals. The two wingers, Shaw, Rendell, Gray, we’ve got more than enough firepower. Stuart was left out for tactical reasons tonight.

“I didn’t think it would be Stuart’s type of game tonight. I thought it would be a fight. It was a fight, there wasn’t an awful lot of football played in the game.

“It was a slog on a difficult surface which in the end a really good goal, I thought it was a good goal to be fair, has separated the teams.

“So I thought we had enough firepower on the pitch. We just never found the right routes to goal tonight.”

But Buckle conceded that the result wasn’t good enough for a club of Luton’s expectations.

“It’s never good enough when you lose in a Luton shirt,” he said.

“We know what we carry when we go anywhere in the country to play football.

“You saw the atmosphere tonight, you saw how up for the game the Dartford players were and for 60-plus minutes it was a good game.

“It was a dogged game, it’s what the Conference is all about and a really excellent goal separated the two teams. I thought after that we recovered fairly well, we tried to pass the ball, but our quality wasn’t there tonight. I thought it had 0-0 written all over it.”

And he lamented how the Luton name always brought out the best in opposition teams, adding: “I thought it was going to be a fight of a game, I thought it was going to be a tough old game. We’re not just going to come here and roll teams over, we haven’t done it in three and a half years. I’ve got nothing in my mind to think that we’re going to do it now.

“You see it yourselves every time we come and play away from home teams are bang up for it. I mean they’ve lost the last game 2-1 to a team down the bottom with 10 men (Lincoln).

“Every game is an absolute cup final and this is the thing that every game we’ve got to be nine or 10 out of 10 to win.

“It’s what the job is. I’ve got out of this division once and I’m trying to get out of it again with Luton. I know what it takes.”