Conor Hourihane hailed the biggest win of his fledgling managerial career as a benchmark for how he wants Barnsley to play.

The head coach made great play of a clean sheet as well as the courage they showed on the ball in a performance which saw his team sweep Luton Town aside 5-0. Now he wants his team to keep their levels up as they head into four consecutive away games.

"I'm delighted with the lads," he said afterwards. "I want them to play with real courage and take the ball.

"What I'm big on is not just kicking the ball away and slashing at it. We want to play and progress and get us up the pitch in the right way. I thought the lads were brilliant from that point of view.

"I'm so, so thrilled for them. But they need to know that this is hopefully a benchmark for us.

"We'll have a really good week next week and hopefully we can go to Stockport after a really good week on the training ground and give ourselves a chance to get a result.

"We're in a decent place at the minute, but we've got to keep working and keep building on it.

"We're not at home for a while and we've not had a league victory at home for a while. We've had a lot of cup games, we've had international breaks, so it feels like a long time since our last home victory.

BENCHMARK: Barnsley's Conor Hourihane (Image: Jonathan Gawthorpe)

placeholder image — BENCHMARK: Barnsley's Conor Hourihane (Image: Jonathan Gawthorpe)

"I was delighted to put that to bed because we're on the road now for a little bit. I said (to the players) we were pretty impressed with you."

Barnsley only came out of a run of five League One matches without a win home or away at Doncaster Rovers in their final match before the international break, but Hourihane said he had felt a good performance brewing during the two-week period.

"There's been a good buzz, good energy," he said. The training has been really good and I felt like they were in a really good place going into the game.

"We gave them a fair amount of detail information on how we can nullify the opposition and I felt like if we put it together, we were going to put ourselves in a real good place to build into the game and to get the result we all want.

GOAL: Reyes Cleary opens the scoring (Image: Jonathan Gawthorpe)

"So credit to the lads, they've been amazing over this last couple of weeks.

"I asked them to put a kind of a marker down for us in-house to make us feel like we're going in the right direction and to a man, they did it today. I'm really proud of them."

The clean sheet was a highlight for him too.

"I was shouting and screaming even in the last two or three minutes because I was desperate for the clean sheet," he said. "We've worked so hard on this.

"I've made a big point of it and we've done so much work on the grass. Over the last batch of games where we've not kept clean sheets, there's not been too many individual errors. It's just been work with the team and how we look when we're in that little bit of a low block and teams have spells against us.

"We need to be more connected and we need to do our jobs and we've done loads of work on that.

"I know we didn't keep a clean sheet against Donny, but the back line are starting to get even more protection now from the lads in front of them, which is adding to a team-orientated, defence-minded focus at the right time to keep clean sheets."