After achieving a playoff finish in the Championship last season, many doubted the ability of Nathan Jones’s men to pick themselves up after a semi-final defeat to Huddersfield Town and push once again for an unlikely promotion to the Premier League.
The Hatters were able to retain the services of star players such as Elijah Adebayo in the summer and have made some shrewd additions to the squad, actions that have allowed the club to stay on the coattails of the top six after 16 games of this campaign.
Four games without victory at the start of the year raised concerns of a Barnsley-style trajectory in which Luton would be fighting off relegation to the third tier after securing a playoff
place in the year before, but a run of only two losses in their last 12 has everyone involved with the club looking upwards instead of towards the lower reaches of the table.
Forward Carlton Morris arrived from the aforementioned Tykes in the summer, and has netted a team-leading seven times this season, taking some of the attacking burden off Adebayo who was the club’s primary source of goals in their promotion push last year.
If Jones’s men are to repeat or better their finish last season they must improve on their form at Kenilworth Road, where they have only won twice so far this campaign from eight opportunities in front of their raucous home faithful.
Goals from Manchester United loanee Amad Diallo and midfielder Daniel Neilput Sunderland into a commanding 2-0 lead inside 20 minutes at home to Vincent Kompany’s exciting Burnley side last weekend.
By the time the full-time whistle had sounded, the Black Cats had experienced a second-half capitulation and surrendered all three points to the Clarets, conceding four goals after the break in a fashion that had blood boiling in the North-East.
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That defeat means Tony Mowbray’s side have lost three of their last four in the Championship and have consequently slipped to 16th in the standings after a flying start that saw them inside the top six.
It must be said that those trio of defeats have come against top Championship sides in Swansea City, Blackburn Rovers and most recently Burnley,
with Sunderland showing over the course of the season so far that they have more than enough to survive at this level after a four-year tussle with England’s third tier.
A trip to Bedfordshire is an unfamiliar one for Sunderland, having only played at Kenilworth Road once in the last 15 years, with that rare matchup a 2018-19 League One encounter that ended in a share of the spoils.
