Luton Town’s performances in the Premier League this season under Rob Edwards may have been a surprise to many but not to Andy Pryce. It was the former goalkeeper turned chairman who handed Edwards a first permanent senior managerial role at the Conference North side AFC Telford United back in 2017.
“He was very young but he’s a local Telford lad who had a great professional playing career,” Pryce says. “We knew that he was a very talented coach at the time and this was his first step as a manager. He found it tough but I think that was because he was in the non-league system and you could tell he needed to be coaching in a professional environment.”
Whereas Luton have been hard to beat at Kenilworth Road, where Manchester United are the visitors on Sunday, Telford suffered five successive defeats at their New Bucks Head stadium to kick off the Edwards era, culminating in a 5-1 hammering against Harrogate Town. “I don’t like losing by a few goals at home, it’s not acceptable – I’m angry,” said their exasperated manager at the time.
Edwards had already taken charge of Wolves for two Premier League matches in October 2016 when Walter Zenga was sacked, Edwards having retired from playing three years earlier at the age of 30 owing to persistent injury problems. The former Wales defender had been on the staff at Molineux for two years having spent the previous 12 months working simultaneously at the Wolves and Manchester City academies for nothing.
“I wasn’t getting paid for it, but it certainly wasn’t for nothing in the end, and it was an incredible time,” Edwards said in an interview in 2020. “It was a year of learning, like being a young player all over again, picking up as much information as I could, honing my skills and thinking and reflecting about the game.”
After working under Zenga and Paul Lambert, who was sacked at the end of the 2016-17 season, Edwards made a drastic career move by dropping down five divisions and joining his local club as manager at the stadium where Wolves’ Under-23s also played.
“We just thought it would be a good progression for Rob and to try to integrate some of the Under-23s into Telford,” Pryce says. “It was a joint decision with Wolves. He was very meticulous with everything he did and wanted to do everything very professionally. We tried to achieve those standards but obviously budgets are very different in non-league and some things he wants to try to implement we couldn’t for financial reasons.
“The transition was difficult: he was used to working with players every day and had to get used to only seeing them twice a week after work. He was trying to implement professional training sessions but when you only have a couple of hours it’s very difficult to do that. We did struggle at the start but by the end of the season the players had all bought into the Rob Edwards ways and we finished the season very strongly. I think he learned a lot from his time at Telford.”
Edwards later admitted he “made it too complicated in trying to play a certain style of football” and has described his season at Telford, when they finished 14th, as “my most difficult time so far in coaching but also the best learning experience I have ever had”.
He returned to Wolves to take charge of the Under-23s at the end of the season before leaving for a job with the Football Association in October 2019. There Edwards started working regularly with his assistant Richie Kyle as an in-possession and out-of-possession specialist coach with England’s Under-16s and Under-20s, in a role newly created by the then technical director, Dan Ashworth. Kyle followed Edwards, who cites his former Blackpool manager Ian Holloway as one of his main managerial inspirations and regularly seeks advice from him, to Forest Green – where they sealed promotion to League One in 2022 – and the short-lived spell at Watford at the start of last season.
Fifty-two days later, Edwards was confirmed as the manager of their arch-rivals and the rest is history, Luton sealing a historic promotion via the playoffs after beating Coventry in a shootout. “Rob’s biggest thing is that he is a very, very nice man,” says Pryce, who stepped down as Telford chairman in January after seven years at the helm. “He is one of those people that if you can see he is putting in the hard work, then you would run through brick walls for him and go into battles every day. You could see that when he was at Telford so it’s surprised us and not surprised us at Telford to see how quickly he’s got to where he’s got.”
Pryce says: “You’ve seen the right side of Rob this year when it comes to unfortunate situations like with Tom Lockyer’s health issues. He deals with them in the right manner. I texted him after they got promoted and the first game of the Premier League to say: ‘Well done and you’ve come a long way from the Conference North to the Premier League!’ He texted back and always takes the time to communicate with the people he has worked with over the years. I’m sure that at Luton he has got to know everybody and spent time with them.”
Luton’s momentum was stalled by an unexpected home defeat against Sheffield United last weekend but they remain a potent threat to United, having scored 23 goals in their past 11 games, including the 4-0 thrashing of Brighton last month. Sadly for Telford it seems unlikely Edwards will be back to manage his home town club any time soon.
“We sometimes have Telford fans saying: ‘Oh we need Rob Edwards back at the club’ but it’s great to see him doing really well,” says Pryce. “We’re very proud of Rob and to have been a part of his history.”
