Cheered out, booed off: Wilshere’s Luton bow ends with defeat and jeers

Getting booed off after your first match, and booed off with a fair degree of vituperation to boot, was not how Jack Wilshere intended his managerial career to begin. But that was what he endured as he led his players off the Kenilworth Road pitch past a seething Luton fanbase, who two years ago were loving life in the Premier League.

A 2-0 defeat by Nigel Clough’s Mansfield was no disgrace, a finely balanced contest decided by the chances Luton failed to take and those that Mansfield didn’t. It was a loss that left the hosts 14th in League One, eight points off the playoff spots, but Clough was positive about Luton’s prospects of turning things around under Wilshere, and surely that is correct. It would be wrong, though, not to note that there was an eerie note of fatalism in the ground, even as an apparent new era was only just getting under way.

Wilshere said the end of the match would not tarnish his memory of the beginning, when the former Arsenal star was serenaded on to the pitch with chants of “Super Jack” and the crowd were on their feet applauding. “It was probably one of the best moments of my career,” he said. “I felt the love, I heard the noise.” He also put the result down to technical errors, albeit mistakes that allowed a longstanding lack of confidence among his players to come to the surface.

“When you come from the Premier League straight to League One in two seasons, there obviously is something [going on],” he said. “So we knew that, we have to find out what it is, and I think we know what it is. We just have to find ways of being able to give the players more confidence. I’ve said to them before, I want them to really feel the belief I have in them, and that doesn’t change.”

The link between a team and its fans is almost as crucial to a club’s success as that between players and coach. When one side is at odds with the other, bad results often follow. Increasingly in the modern era, however, fans and players seem to mirror each other. That lack of confidence and belief Wilshere noted in his players, was also clearly detectable among the support.

Luton recorded their biggest crowd of the season, at 11,784, but the atmosphere in the town and around the ground was subdued. Among the crowd was Elk Walsh, from Adelaide, who had followed Luton all of his life because of his parents’ affiliations and was now making his first trip to the ground. Walsh described himself as “eternally hopeful” in the manner you would expect from someone who had flown across the world to watch lower league football. But he also described Wilshere’s appointment as “spinning the wheel” and was still upset at the club’s decision to dispense with the stalwart midfielder Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu in the summer. More frustrating still, he said, was his team’s failure to score goals: “I feel like we’re never going to score sometimes, like we’re battling against an invisible force and I don’t understand why.”

Luton fans display a welcome message to the new manager, Jack Wilshere, and the assistant, Chris Powell, at the start of the match. Photograph: Marc Atkins/Getty Images

That invisible force was present on the Kenilworth Road pitch again as Luton emerged from a sticky opening period to take control of the game, but never scored. Their best player, Jordan Clark, who sat in Wilshere’s old No 10 position and impressed with some delicate touches, saw a beautiful effort clawed out of a top corner by Mansfield’s Liam Roberts on the half-hour. Almost immediately after he won a penalty with a slaloming run, only for Nahki Wells to strike a tame effort into Roberts’s midriff. Seven minutes after that, Wells misplaced a pass awfully in the centre of the field and the Mansfield striker Rhys Oates was able to hit an effort almost identical to Clark’s, albeit with the one key difference that it flew into the back of the net.

From then on there was no sense that a team who have lost 53 games in the past two and a bit seasons were going to turn things around. An ungainly handball on the hour led to a penalty which Tyler Roberts rolled past Josh Keeley, and Mansfield eased their way to victory. Luton, meanwhile, struggled to make a pass or take a decision that wasn’t the wrong one.

How do a club and the town they belong to pull themselves out of a spiral of doom and gloom? For Wilshere it is a case of sticking together, learning lessons and building confidence. For Clough, who had taken charge of a remarkable 1,544th game as a manager and has Mansfield ninth, there is also a question of expectations and perspective. “We’re at Mansfield enjoying life in League One,” he said. “We’ve been in it for a season and a bit now, the first time that the club has stayed in the division for 35 years. So we’re enjoying ourselves and if we get anywhere near the top six, it’ll be a major bonus. Luton are expected to be in that top six, and it’s a different thing to deal with. Completely different.”