Miron Muslic hails Plymouth Argyle fight after defending Luton’s ‘thousand long balls’

Plymouth boss Miron Muslic hailed his side’s ability to bounce back as they earned a 1-1 draw against Championship relegation rivals Luton at Kenilworth Road.

Having fallen behind to Jacob Brown’s 55th-minute opener, the visitors levelled with 20 minutes left when Maksym Talovierov rose highest to nod home from Kornel Szucs’ deep cross.

The equaliser prevented Argyle from slipping to the bottom of the table, where Luton lie after their winless run stretched to 11 games.

Miron Muslic

Muslic said: “It was a very vertical, very direct football game. The atmosphere was amazing. Beautiful.

“Luton were very physical, very direct. I think we had to defend one thousand long balls, throw-ins, tried to occupy their set-pieces in our box and we did it well defensively.

“We didn’t allow them a lot of chances in open play, the set-pieces, free-kicks, this you can’t defend all the time and this goal we conceded was just a miscommunication from the centre-backs as maybe the reason was because a new player entered the game and they didn’t really realise who was in charge.

“I think bouncing back is super difficult, especially knowing it’s Luton. We know their ranking, know their situation, but bouncing back is a new mentality we have.

“We bounced back against Sunderland and bounced back against West Brom and also tonight, so OK I’m happy with the point.

“It was not easy and this will be a massive point if we can perform again on Saturday against Cardiff.”

Luton boss Matt Bloomfield remains without a victory since replacing Rob Edwards at Kenilworth Road.

The Hatters sit bottom of the table, a point behind Plymouth and two from safety, and Bloomfield is aware of the hard work that lies ahead of them.

Matt Bloomfield

He said: “We wanted three points, we wanted to win the game. I thought we did enough to win the game and we’re really frustrated not to have done so with the amount of opportunities we created.

“We limited our opposition to very little, but we didn’t do the two boxes good enough to win the game ultimately and we’re really frustrated about that.

“We’re disappointed, the players are disappointed, but they’ve put everything out on the pitch and I don’t think we can argue against that.

“We’ll pick the bones out of it like we always do and use the negatives for moving forward and look to use the negatives for the things that we need to improve on as there’s lots of work still to do and we aim to do that.”

READ MORE: Plymouth hit back to draw with Luton in bottom-of-the-table Championship clash