Indefatigable Still is relishing turning disappointing Town around and getting players to ‘click’

He admitted that none of his players have performed as well as he would have expected but is relishing the task of turning things around.

Still said: “I’m waiting for them all to click! We worked really hard pre-season, a fantastic attitude in pre-season, a fantastic attitude in training, but if I look at the whole of the squad and was to ask the question, who played well? I’m still thinking because we haven’t had anyone that’s played to the level that they would be happy with.”

But a slow start to the season is nothing new for experienced manager Still, who continued: “I’ve been there as many times as you’d like when you start the season and you don’t start well, I’ve been there without any doubt.

“But the key for me is to keep working with the players, to believe in the players and for the players to believe in themselves, to be unaffected by outside influences and to just go and relax and play and if you do that, if you’re good players, you start to play well.

“There isn’t a magic wand and there isn’t a magic formula, it’s just hard work.”

And it is the task of improving the players, improving the team and improving the performances that will help to drive Still on.

He said: “This might sound stupid as well, but because I’ve been doing it a long while, you know what, I love this side of it, I love the challenge when things (aren’t going well). When things are flowing and things are going well, that’s great as well, but I actually love the challenge of this wonderful game that we’re involved in. It ain’t quite right, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that.

“I love the challenge of that, that’s part of the thing that drives me, I have to be honest. When I say to people about building teams. Sometimes people that don’t want to know don’t really understand, but I’ve been fortunate enough at clubs to have worked for a long time and a small club like Barnet got in the play-offs twice and we sold players like Darren Currie and Marlon King and Sam Stockley, we developed players and we became successful.

“At Dagenham we became really successful with two promotions and developing players. I love that side of it and when you start it it ain’t always right, you hope it is, but it isn’t.

“But that to me, that’s the part of it that I love, to develop that. We had a saying when I was at Dagenham, to play for Dagenham you had to be a Dagger. There had to be something about you.

“Well I’m not there now, I’m here. And I want players, that don’t want to come to Luton because we get 6,000 people, I don’t want them to come to Luton because we supposedly pay more money than anyone else, it’s stopped, we don’t do that now, I want them to come because they want to play for Luton. And gradually we’ll end up with a group of players that are passionate about playing for Luton as they were passionate about playing for Dagenham, as they were passionate to play for Barnet.

“And when you get that and you get the success that comes with it it’s fantastic.”

Why a team isn’t performing as well as it is capable of is an enigma every manager is faced with, but after such a good pre-season campaign Still is adamant there is more to come from his players.

“It’s not a one-on-one sport. You can play and be effected by other people so combinations perhaps are not quite right and need a bit more work with them,” he said.

“In pre-season it’s unreal. What pre-season tells you, and what it told me, is that we have very fit players, very organised players and we have players that can play. And it showed because we saw it, forget the results, we actually saw it.

“What it’s showing now is that we’re not playing as well as we believe we are capable of, because we’ve shown we can play quite well.

“That can be effected by so many things that are around us. Players perhaps not dealing best with the pace of the game. The pace of the pre-season games are not as high normally as league games and not quite into that groove. Not maybe being as sharp as we’d like to be.

“You plan you’re pre-season training and we are fit, but fitness doesn’t really show until the season gets longer and longer. We might not be quite as sharp as I would like us to be because maybe we didn’t perhaps do enough sharp stuff, but that might just be because we didn’t do it, we didn’t feel it was necessary and maybe we wouldn’t miss it. There’s a million things that can almost sound like excuses. But at the end of the day, it’s been a disappointing start performance-wise to the season.

“We could be sitting here with no points, but we’re sitting here with four because we’ve worked hard. Let’s just add a little bit of quality to that work ethic and I’m sure the points will start mounting up.”

Saturday’s game at title favourites Forest Green Rovers marks the start of a run of five difficult matches, but Still can’t wait for his side to find their identity and get on a roll.

He said: “It’s a difficult couple of weeks, but it’s three games. It ain’t great and it might not be great next week, but we will get to where we want to get to with the players, and once we find that we will find that it grows and grows and grows and that’s the exciting thing for me.”

However, it won’t be until eight games are played that Still will start to draw any conclusions about his side, as he continued: “You get to eight games and you look at it. You see if you might need to tinker with this, systems, players. But you have to give systems and players an opportunity. When I first came here last season, the first team weren’t very good, but gradually we found it and the performances improved.

“And that’s really where we are at the moment. Not just us, I’m guessing there’s a few teams that will be having the same chat as I’m having that it isn’t quite as good as they would have liked to have thought.

“But I’ve been doing this job so long that I don’t really have an expectation at the start of the season, I just go with the flow with it and then work with what I think I should do once I’ve had the required number of games really.”

And while the start Luton have had is nowhere near as good as Still would have liked he is glad that his side have at least competed and worked hard in the 2-0 victory over Salisbury City and the 1-1 draw with Macclesfield Town.

He added: “It’s been a funny start really, because we’ve taken four points from not playing well, I have to say that. If the penalty goes in at Southport, and not saying it would have ended 1-1, we might have had five points from nine and I would have gone, that’s not a bad return five points and we haven’t played well.

“But what we have done in the last two games, we’ve competed. To me that’s always the key, if we can compete I know that we have good players, I know that we have players that we’re developing, and I know that gradually that side of it will get better. But the competition bit, the competing in the game, I felt we turned up to Southport and didn’t, in the other two we’ve competed all over the pitch and I think that’s probably the reason that we’ve got four points.

“The reason we’ve got four points hasn’t been we’ve played that well, it’s because we’ve really competed and not stopped. We scored in the 90-whatever-minute-it-was and that wasn’t through playing well, that was through keeping going and competing. And to any success that’s the key.”