Luton Town's Great Escape?

Forget the race for the Premiership title. A prominent feeling of predictability could have foreseen the dip in Liverpool’s form which would hand the title on a silver platter to multi title winners Manchester United.

The real battle everyone SHOULD be talking about is the battle of one time top tier team Luton Town’s battle against the odds and an arguably unfair penalty. Relegated in consecutive seasons Luton Town Football Club fell into League Two amid a cash flow crisis and what was said to be "financial irregularities", with the end result, one rarely seen in the footballing world, being a horrific 30-point penalty; the bulk of it attributing to Luton Town coming out of administration against the usual protocol and without a "Company Voluntary Agreement".

So the season for the Hatters was, to say the least, a mammoth challenge in itself. First they would have to get to zero points and then play catch up with which ever teams were languishing dangerously above the drop zone.

The season didn’t start too badly. Yes it could have been better but Luton emerged sometimes victorious, and finally on January 13^th 2009 they clawed their way to zero with a draw against relegation battlers Chester City. Obviously Luton Town would have appreciated getting there sooner, but just the fact they got to zero saved any statistical embarrassment of becoming a team ending a season with minus points, giving them a better chance of getting to a points tally just a little bit more respectable.

It is a shame it seems then that the whole season appears to be heading to something of an anti-climax. Luton have thrown everything at their survival challenge, including fielding their youngest player in the club's history, Jordan Patrick, who was 16 years and 11 days old when he put on his number 29 shirt against Grimsby Town.

They then nearly broke that record a few weeks later when attempting to place 15-year-old Jean-Phillipe Yamfam on the bench, a move which was blocked due to competition rules. A celebrated cup run in the Football League trophy also garnered some credibility in what could be their farewell to the Football League.

Luton Town now find themselves with survival achievable but gradually becoming more seemingly impossible. With 14 games remaining they had a 14 point deficit to 22^nd place and guaranteed safety, a shame considering without the points deduction they would be comfortably safe with a slight glimmer of playoff hopes.

As it stands now they still face that 14 point deficit but with only 11 games remaining to achieve the great escape. One would hope that a simple string of five or so straight victories would put them in with an improved fighting chance, but with Luton’s form book showing no signs of consistency this year, that remains unlikely.

Their saving grace just might be scoring points in most of their remaining games in the hope that Grimsby and Chester City, by far the weakest teams in the league this season, falter and fail to score little in the way of points before the finale of the 2008-09 season.

It would be a great shame to lose a team never at the top of the country's footballing world, but a team who are steeped in history for cup triumphs and a rampant following of Mad Hatters! Relegation would see them out of the league and out of our mindset and something tells you they just might not reappear instantaneously in the following few seasons.

Only time will tell, and an optimistic outcome would give a great story of grit and determination emerging to undo the ridiculous hindrance placed on a team who did not deserve such a gigantic travesty.