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When Arsenal went top of the Premier League against Luton last week, it wasn’t their fans who were celebrating. Comfortable in their two-goal lead, the home crowd were slipping out before the end and the stadium was empty soon after the whistle. But not entirely. Clustered in the south-east corner, nearly 3,000 Luton fans stayed to serenade their beloved manager. Oh for someone who looks at you the way a Latonia looks at Rob Edwards.

It was Luton’s eighth Premier League defeat in 10 games and their 19th of the season. The Bedfordshire side sat 18th in the table, three points adrift of Nottingham Forest. And yet nothing can sour the love. “In this situation, if they turned, it would be really, really tough,” Edwards said after the game. “It gives me a lot of belief, that they’re with us.

”Belief is a hard-working word in Edwards’s vocabulary. It underpins the never-say-die approach that has defined his team’s performances, and which his supporters so appreciate. And it may yet keep them up. Three days after the Arsenal game, in their must-win match against Bournemouth, it was 0-0 at half-time and Luton were a goal down seven minutes later. If Jordan Clark’s equaliser sent a bolt of electricity around Kenilworth Road, then Carlton Morris’s 90th-minute winner threatened spontaneous combustion.

Late goals have become Luton’s speciality: 17 of their 45 Premier League goals have come after the 75th minute. Arsenal match that proportion and only Liverpool surpass it. Of the Hatters’ 19 defeats, 13 – including those by Tottenham, Aston Villa, Manchester United, Chelsea and the reverse fixture against Arsenal – have been by a single goal. This month they battled for 86 minutes before Son Heung-min deprived them of a point at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Sitting at the club’s training centre, on the site of the former recreation ground for Vauxhall’s car plant, the 41-year-old Edwards describes the past month as a “difficult period”. “I would really struggle if we were losing and we weren’t performing, we weren’t competitive,” he says. “But we have competed, and competed with the best.”