Luton Town never saw best of Hartlepool goalscoring machine - £500k transfer was a major Hatters flop | OneFootball

The money that Luton spent on Adam Boyd in 2006 was a lot of money down the drain, but even this was the least of the club's problems at the time.

Half a million pounds was a lot of money for Luton Town to spend on a player in 2006, and a transfer that went wrong was the last thing they needed as the club spiraled into a crisis from which would take a long time for them to recover from.

On the surface, Luton Town seemed to be a fairly happy club by the summer of 2006.

The disastrous chairmanship of property developer John Gurney - which was memorably recorded by the BBC TV show Trouble At The Top - was done, the club had won the League One title in 2005, and had completed their first season back in the Championship by finishing in a highly creditable 10th place.

But further trouble was brewing, and a new half-million pound striker was about to walk right into the eye of the storm.

Such had been the strength of Luton's performance throughout the 2005-06 season that the Hatters were hoping to push on to better things under manager Mike Newell.

Strengthening was needed that summer, and over the course of 2006-07 the club spent money on four new players.

But it would be the most expensive of these four who would flop the hardest, as Luton began a journey which would wind up with the club playing non-league football for the first time since 1920.

Adam Boyd had proved himself in the lower divisions before arriving at Kenilworth Road in the summer of 2006.

The striker had been born in Hartlepool, supported Hartlepool United as a child, and joined their academy at the age of 16 in 1998.

Boyd made a major impact for Pools once he was deemed ready for the senior game.

Unexpectedly drafted into the first-team squad at the start of 2000, he marked his debut at Shrewsbury Town by scoring a stoppage-time winner.

But he was unable to initially hold down a place in the first-team and was sent off to Boston United on loan in 2004.

The change of scenery, however, seemed to do him good.

He returned to Victoria Park at the end of the 2003-04 season, and the following year he did break into the first-team in style, scoring 23 goals as Pools raced to a sixth-placed finish in League One before losing to Sheffield Wednesday in the final of the League One play-offs.

But the 2005-06 season was a bit of a disaster for Boyd.

Contracting a blood infection after a serious knee injury, he missed five months and ended up only playing 21 League games for them, scoring four times.

However, his 79 goals in 273 appearances helped him earn legendary status at his hometown club, and remains one of Hartlepool United's best ever players.

Boyd was an expensive flop, but he couldn't have joined Luton Town at a worse time

But that summer came a surprise move.

The Luton manager Newell had been the Hartlepool manager throughout the 2002-03 season and knew Boyd well.

Rating the player and seeking to take advantage of him perhaps being undervalued as a result of the injury and subsequent infection, Luton made a bid of £500,000 to take the player to Kenilworth Road which was eventually agreed in the summer of 2006.

On the pitch, the Hatters made a decent start to the 2006-07 season. By the latter stages of October, they were in fifth place in the Championship table. But Boyd was nowhere to be seen throughout this.

Luton fans became frustrated at what they did see of him, and unsurprisingly so. The club were still in a precarious financial condition after the John Gurney era, and half a million pounds was a lot of money to spend on a player who wasn't showing signs of being able to adapt to life in the second-tier.

The wheels fell off Luton's season suddenly and unexpectedly. On the coach on the way to a match at Ipswich, left-back Sol Davis suffered a stroke. Clearly and understandably unsettled by this, Luton lost the match 5-0, the first of seven successive defeats.

By the end of November, they were fifth from bottom rather than fifth from top. At least by this time Boyd had scored his first goal for the club, in a 3-2 defeat at QPR earlier in the month.

Unfortunately for Boyd, though, this turned out to be his only League goal for the club, as well. But Boyd's lack of acclimatisation to the Championship wasn't the only problem the club faced that season.

Newell was sacked on the 15th March 2007 following a run of five straight defeats, after he criticised the directors of the club over a lack of investment in the team, but even then, the club's problems were only just beginning.

Kevin Blackwell was appointed to replace Newell on a caretaker basis, but things were only getting worse and worse.

On the 11th April, chairman Bill Tomlin resigned after admitting three counts of making illegal payments to agents. By this time, the team was in a tail-spin from which they couldn't recover. With just four points taken from their last 13 games, they were relegated in 23rd place in the table.

Adam Boyd left Luton Town in the summer of 2007 for Leyton Orient. He had a solid couple of seasons at Brisbane Road before returning to Hartlepool, where he'd play for three further years before drifting down into the non-league game, via a short-term deal with Lincoln City.

But Luton Town, without knowing it at that time, were on the cusp of a waking nightmare.

Deducted ten points over the illegal payments issue, they were relegated for a second successive season in 2008, and things got even worse that summer, when the Football League told the club that they would have to accept a staggering thirty-point deduction for the 2008-09 season over a failure to agree a Company Voluntary Agreement (CVA) to exit administration, having already been docked ten for entering into it the previous season.

The League justified this because it was the third time that the club had been in administration over the previous ten years, but Luton fans were incandescent, as were the club's new owners, who felt that they were being punished for the misdeeds of previous owners.

Luton never stood a chance the following season. They ended 2008-09 on 26 points, 15 short of safety. After 89 years, Luton Town would be a non-league club again. It would take them five years to get back.

To a point, Adam Boyd was the wrong player at the wrong time at the wrong club. As can be seen from their three spells in administration, Luton were a club who'd been mismanaged for years upon his arrival there. These problems had been building under the surface over a period of years, and it may be that everything that followed his arrival at the club would have happened whether he'd signed for them or not.

But it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that spending £500,000 on a new striker when they were in the position they were in probably wasn't the wisest decision that Luton could have made at that time.

Boyd wasn't the only player they spent money on that summer. Sam Parkin also joined from Ipswich for £350,000, and the club spent a further £450,000 the following January on Matthew Spring and Drew Talbot from Watford and Sheffield Wednesday respectively. It was all money they could ill-afford to spend.

Had Boyd's goals fired Luton into the Premier League in 2007, perhaps what followed could have been avoided. But while he was the biggest flop of that particular era for Luton Town, he was far from the full extent of the club's problems at that time. Those had already been going on for years.