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Harper on the Hatters: Luton summer signing starting to make big impression

In a season where there have been many questions asked about Luton, perhaps the biggest one, and certainly one that lasted among the longest, was what did the people in charge see in Simon Sluga to pay a club record fee for him?

To be fair for much of the campaign it was a fair question for the Hatters fans to ask, as things began with a series of high profile mistakes, leading directly to goals and dropped points.

In fact things got so bad that Graeme Jones had no choice but to drop the Croatia international out of fairness, to the goalkeeper himself, his deputy, his teammates and us, the fans who pay big money to travel in our numbers to watch Luton week in, week out.

Naturally in the modern football world, Sluga was then completely written off by the majority, with there being plenty who would have been happy to see him deported back to his native land, had the chance arrived.

Thankfully for us though, Graeme Jones knew he had a good goalkeeper at his disposal and managed him well, which helped when he was forced to bring him back in when James Shea was injured.

While fewer in regularity, errors still appeared but you could immediately see a better stopper in front of our eyes, one which has grown in confidence in the last month in particular, and who could well be a major factor in us surviving this season.

It took Sluga until his 20th appearance to keep a clean sheet, and now he has two in as many games, behind a defence that is getting better than stronger all the time. They are now being organised by the Croatian and all of a sudden we have the international goalkeeper we knew we signed.

Credit goes to everyone at the club for that, and if the 26-year-old continues to become more settled, and confident as a result, over the last two months of the season, he could well turn out to be money extremely well spent.

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