Luton’s giddy promotion fulfils long dream of returning to the elite

T en minutes after Rob Edwards had been brought to a halt halfway around Wembley, celebrating furiously a goal that was shortly disallowed, the Luton manager was to be found victorious but calm as still water. His first action on winning the playoff final was to hug his opponent Mark Robins. Around this tender scene was pure chaos; his players haring about, embracing and hurling each other to the ground like so many 6ft-tall puppy dogs. Promotion, it’s a hell of a drug.

Luton Town are a Premier League club and international broadcast packages can now finally be cut probing the various tiny entrances to Kenilworth Road. For the Hatters there is joy, hope and – especially for the players – the chance to change their lives. For Coventry, whose disconsolate players stood motionless for 15 minutes after the end of a penalty shootout which featured 11 kicks scored and one ballooned horribly over the bar, there will currently – but not permanently – be sorrow.

This was a contest between great English conurbations – one a city, one a town – but both with long histories and significant industrial legacy, each also wearily familiar with having their names dropped in a story of national decline. For the places, read the football teams, too. The top-flight history of Coventry and Luton is long enough in the past to have acquired the edge of nostalgia, for a time when football was simpler, perhaps, but also when places that now rarely feature in the national conversation could actually make the weather.

So the match was clearly about more than money. That’s the way the Championship playoff final is framed, and what used to be the £120m game is now the £170m one, which is fortunate given the cost of living nowadays. But to feel the