Luton chief confirms Hatters trio are all available for West Ham trip

Hatters boss Rob Edwards will be able to choose from the strongest squad available to him for almost three months at West Ham United tomorrow after confirming that attacker Chiedozie Ogbene is fit enough to be included once more.

The 27-year-old has been out of action since mid-March after suffering a hamstring injury when on international duty with the Republic of Ireland. It has kept the summer signing out of the last seven matches, with Town sorely missing his explosive pace on the right hand side, as they have won just one of those the fixtures he has been sidelined for, losing five to take four points from a possible 21.

However, Ogbene, who has scored four goals in his 28 top flight outings, will now be in the squad that travels to the London Stadium for the 3pm kick-off, as Edwards said: “We’ve got Chieo Ogbene back training with us. He’s been back the last couple of days which is good, so he can come into the squad, other than that we’re where we are. We’ll try and get him involved, he’s only had a couple of days training, but we’re at the stage now where we want to try and get players who can influence games back involved and Chieo is one of those.”

Ogbene will hope to have a similar impact to fellow absentee Elijah Adebayo who returned as a substitute in the 2-1 defeat at Wolves last month, and then scored his 10th of the campaign when starting the 1-1 draw with Everton a week ago. Edwards continued: “Eli had a little bit more training than Chieo, but he’d been out for a considerable amount of time and made a big impact, so if required, let’s hope Chieo can as well

“He’s been a player that we’ve missed, he’s had two days of training and match day minus two and one are never the most intense of sessions. There’s elements we can work on intensity, but there’ll always be an element of risk when he’s on the pitch. Clearly when he’s on it and you can get him in the right areas and the right spaces, he can cause anyone problems.”

Meanwhile both Carlton Morris and Ross Barkley are available after missing the Luton Town Supporters’ Trust presentation evening on Tuesday night due to feeling unwell, meaning that Town are now without just Mads Andersen, Dan Potts, Marvelous Nakamba, Jacob Brown, Tom Lockyer and Amari’i Bell for the trip to east London.

The boss said: “They’re (Barkley and Morris) good as gold, a couple of good days of training, so they’re fine. It’s the strongest squad we’ve had available for a while. Obviously we’ve got a number of people missing, key people, but we were never going to get those lads back, so we’re as strong really as we can be now for the last couple of games.”

Despite the lengthy injury list significantly hampering Town’s ability to mount a push clear of the relegation zone during the second half of the season, Luton sitting three points behind Nottingham Forest with two games to go, after a run of one victory in 15, Edwards didn’t want to think about any what ifs with survival still a possibility.

He added: “We could be looking back and going ‘what an incredible year,’ and that’s the way I want to try and look at it at the moment. It’s still there for us and okay, the gods are against us, but they have been all season long. We’ll see where we’re at next Sunday, but that all depends on what we do tomorrow and how we perform. I don’t want to look back at the moment and think about things like that when we can still achieve something special.”