Vine next out of Luton?

Vine: Next player to be sold?

Rowan Vine may be the next Luton player to leave the club after it was revealed Cardiff were in negotiations with Luton over him.

Vine has scored 13 goals this season for Luton and 32 in 110 appearances overall for Luton. Cardiff, who were Luton's visitors on New Year's Day, have apparently had a bid of around £650,000 turned down by Luton, but are thought to be still interested in Vine. Norwich are also rumoured to be interested in signing the 24-year old striker, possibly to replace Earnshaw in case he leaves.

Vine has been superb for Luton this season, taking over the role of main goalscorer from Steve Howard well. Last season and the season before, he was not very prolific but did a considerable amount of work for the team. Now he has become a prolific goalscorer and is our only real threat in front of goal. In these kind of situations, I would try and stay unbiased and look at the positive and negative aspects to a possible departure of Rowan Vine from Luton, but I can't really see many positive things about it. Vine and Edwards are our two top scorers this season, and although we can probably survive without Carlos' contributions in front of goal, can any Luton fan honestly say that we will do well without Vine? A similar situation occured last season with Burnley and Ade Akinbiyi. When he was sold in the January transfer window, they struggled for goals and didn't do as well in the second half of the season. The only real difference was that Burnley had a good enough defence to cope - we haven't. Individually, our defenders are very good players but we still let a lot of goals in. So can we afford to sell our best striker if we're struggling to keep goals out?

This is only a secondary issue though. The main problem will be scoring goals. Our top scorer taking out Vine and Edwards is Dean Morgan with four goals, then Brkovic with three. Can we really afford to hope that Dean Morgan will start playing well consistently to score our goals and keep us up? And can we afford to rely on Brko getting more crucial goals, as he always seems to do for us. It is true that we can sign a striker with the money we get for Vine, but there is a risk that he won't perform. Boyd, Parkin and

Feeney: Off form

Feeney haven't impressed since joining the club, and although all three have shown considerable potential, I don't think we can afford to wait for them to start scoring goals - I think that they have only scored 5 between them all season, which is less than half that of Vine. The money will definitely be good, and at any other time anything over £1million would be excellent value for a club like us. But with a relegation battle on our hands, would the £1million still be as useful if we went down? None of us want to know the answer to that. Hopefully, we can at least keep hold of Vine until the summer, but with the pessimistic mood I'm in concerning Luton at the moment, I'm not convinced.