WEMBLEY STADIUM — Nine years ago, Luton Town ended a promotion season with an away win against Hyde and returned to the Football League. So if they ask for a minute or two or six weeks to process what happened at Wembley and the three years leading up to it, it would probably be fair to wait a while as they collect their thoughts.
You would struggle to describe anything about Luton Town as Premier League. But everyone is screaming about Premier League with red faces and orange shirts and they’re absolutely right and we are wrong. Football keeps on turning and there will be another fairytale along sometime soon. But until then, Luton have the monopoly. It will take a while to eclipse this one.
The temptation when absorbing sport in the moment is to melodramatise and hyperbolise. So you take a few steps back to take it all in one shot and…there was still too much drama for one day, even with 20 minutes of injury time.
Three disallowed goals, two wonderfully constructed actual goals, a final that swung one way and then the other until you stopped trying to guess what would happen next because it would only make you look like a fool. And then penalties, cruel but inevitable and expertly taken until the last. It seems unjust to even mention Fakaty Dabo’s name.
This was a special play-off final, perhaps even unique given the strands that intertwined between Luton Town and Coventry City.
Freed From Desire, suddenly a retro football classic in the 2020s, is usually played after full-time to congratulate the winners. At Wembley on Saturday, the interminable DJ made the admittedly excellent decision to play it before the game.
For roughly four minutes, both ends of the national stadium jumped and sang as if to celebrate victory – we’ll dance and then we’ll fight. Coventry City and Luton Town have been freed from just about everything else over the last few years; desire might as well be next.
The Championship play-off final is the best fixture to attend as a neutral bar none, although it is rarely a feast of entertainment. Nowhere else in sport in this country will you get so many people in one place, roughly split equally between two competitors, where the outcome means so much. Accept no flimsy imitations from your other sports. This is it.
And it shows. On Wembley Way, when you can see your upcoming fate but can’t quite feel it yet, there is false bravado and beery cheer in the sun that could trick you into thinking you were here for a good time. Then you get to your seat and see the pitch and something does a backflip deep in your stomach. It can be released only through noise. Every goalkeeper catch brings a roar, every contested throw-in an appeal as if pleading for your life.
Luton were the more direct, which can often help early in monstrously important contests simply because there are fewer actions that can go wrong because your muscles have been replaced by jelly.
In some ways, Luton exist in one true state in which they are endlessly attempting to create a chance from a cross or pull-back. They win 50-50s and headers and play crossfield passes – this is not agricultural, you understand – but they are never happier than when one of Carlton Morris or Elijah Adebayo is ushering the ball to an overlapping runner and then demanding it back. It is effective and it is magnificent to watch.
Chances came and chances went and those in blue began to feel a little less so. With half-time came renewed energy and with the second half came the moment, the only time that Gustavo Hamer and Viktor Gyokeres connected. The sky-blue smog hanging over Wembley tells you all you need to know. Yet it was merely a temporary relief, a well-meaning but ultimately pointless shot of adrenalin and hope that they cursed in the end.
Coventry will run what might have been; how could you not? Outside the stadium, hundreds marched in silence like the haunted faces of those marching home from war. Everything becomes a joke at your expense: the PA announcer hoping everyone had a lovely day; the megaphone voice imploring you to visit the fan park. All they wanted was to be anywhere but here feeling anything but this.
WE ARE PREMIER LEAGUE!
— Luton Town FC (@LutonTown) May 27, 2023#COVLUT | #COYH pic.twitter.com/gFgR6Ulc3N
Still, they know only too well that history is written by and for the winners. This was Luton’s day and this will feel to their supporters like their month and year too. If some might suggest it is merely a counterbalance to their bad times, that’s not how it works.
The football pyramid decides who deserves what. It might be the fault of many or the fault of one, a single bad decision or the collective trauma of a hundred, but you end up where you end up. There is no VIP pass, no “Errr this is awkward but we really shouldn’t be in this division”.
So just like 2014 in non-league, Luton are where they deserve to be. People will mistakenly talk of mini-miracles – ignore them. The intangibles that do exist – guts, resolve, patience, hope, belief – are powered by people who knew what they were doing and, more than anything, remained committed to their ideals when the Premier League wasn’t even a daydream.
The details and the difficulties will be along soon, but they will be drowned out by the glorious songs of victory for a while. Allow them that. Luton Town are Premier League and, to them right now, nothing feels as if it could ever matter more.
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