PLEAT: Luton's glorious promotion to EPL is PROOF great things can be achieved

What a wonderful day for Luton and for small clubs everywhere. It’s proof that, with good housekeeping, sound recruitment and realistic ambition, great things can be achieved.

That little old Luton are now in the Premier League is a great compliment to the current directors and all the hard-working staff they employ. It has been a difficult road back from the depths of the non-League game and huge credit must go to John Still as he was the manager who brought Luton back up into the Football League.

Without him none of what we saw at Wembley would have been possible. He is a great football man with a well of wisdom to draw from.

Saturday was a glorious day for the 38,000 supporters who saw Luton somehow edge past Coventry. What drama. The sadness for me is that only 10,000 of them will be able to watch the team take their steps back in the top division next season. Kenilworth Road has not changed at all since I was last manager there in the 1990s.

I am sure the chief executive Gary Sweet and chairman David Wilkinson will do what they can to help people out. The way they run the club mirrors the way the team play. It’s an ethos built on team spirit and togetherness and honesty.

They have achieved so much just by being sensible in this runaway football world. It was a philosophy that took us places when I was there and it remains the same today.

I have received scores of messages since Saturday from people wishing me well and congratulating me. That’s lovely and it was great to be there. But this is not about me and the past, it’s about Rob Edwards and his players.

They finished 10 points ahead of Coventry and so even though my heart goes out to another fine club and their great supporters, maybe justice was done when Luton triumphed in the shootout.

Penalty shootouts are desperately hard to watch and I hope Fankaty Dabo manages to recover and realise that football is a team game. He should not take it on his own shoulders. I wonder if there is a better way to decide games like this.

This is just an idea but maybe at the end of extra time, if the scores are level, the team that had finished higher in the league table should be given the game. Maybe that would lead to too much defensive football in the added 30 minutes.

I just don’t think penalties always feel that satisfactory.

Luton will not be worrying too much about that this morning and why should they? I remember watching them play away at Northampton several years ago and there were only a couple of hundred in the away end. Saturday at Wembley seemed a world away from that.

A historic day and I am very glad I was there to witness it.