McKenna: Bentley missed a treat

Ken McKenna said ill boss Jim Bentley missed his Morecambe's best performance of the season after a convincing 3-0 win over Luton.

Bentley missed the game with a virus and missed an excellent performance from his side, who have had a habit of shocking the league's top sides this season. McKenna said: "Jim was absolutely gutted to miss the game and the lads wanted to make sure he knew that they dedicated the win to him. "We all really missed him because he is such a character and a leader but they all showed great professionalism to put it to the back of their minds and produce possibly the best performance of the season so far. "We showed in our last home game when we beat Bury that on our day if we perform as well as we are capable of we are a match for anyone in this league. "We started the game well and once they had a man sent off we controlled the game and could have won by more if we had taken our chances. "Some people will point to the sending off but even when it was 11 against 11 we were a match for a very good side and we must look to maintain that type of form over the next few weeks." Morecambe took the lead in the 16th minute after a well worked free-kick which ended with Kevin Ellison drilling the ball into Mark Tyler's goal from 10 yards out. Luton's hopes of an immediate reply were given a setback when they lost skipper McNulty to a red card after he picked up two bookings in the space of two minutes. Morecambe took advantage of the extra man to dominate the rest of the half and added a second on the stroke of half time when Mark Hughes headed home Shaun Beeley's cross past Tyler from six yards out. The Shrimps added a third nine minutes from time when Padraig Amond scored from close range. Luton boss John Still had no complaints about the defeat that saw his side slip to fourth in the table. He said: "It was possibly our worst performance of the season and the best team won on the day it's as simple as that. "With the wind in our faces in the first half I said we needed to get the ball forward at every opportunity but we didn't do that and tried to play too much football and got caught out. "When we lost Steve McNulty to a red card it was a huge blow because he has been magnificent for us this year and we didn't really recover. "I did think that if we kept it to 1-0 at the break we might have had a chance of getting something in the second half but their second goal came at a terrible time and although we had a bit of early pressure we couldn't get the goal we needed to make it interesting.,"