Tony Mowbray felt Rovers missed an excellent chance to prove their top six credentials after being beaten 2-1 at home by Luton Town.

The Hatters followed Charlton Athletic in becoming the second newly-promoted side to win at Ewood Park courtesy of goals from James Collins and Matty Pearson.

Lewis Travis had levelled for Rovers in the 37th minute, but despite their territorial advantage in the second half, the hosts failed to make that count.

Bradley Dack had a goal disallowed for offside with 12 minutes to play, but the boss was disappointed Rovers didn’t test Simon Sluga in the Luton goal enough.

“We stand here frustrated,” Mowbray said.

“I think the league is wide open for someone to go and grab it and why couldn’t that be us? But we have to beat Luton Town, we have to beat Charlton Athletic, if we are going to do that.

“As the season continues we have to become more ruthless.

“We have to win games at home, nick wins away as we’ve been doing, but that’s a huge frustration not being able to get the three points.”

“The first 15 minutes of the game we played probably as well as we have all season.

“The frustration is that we didn’t really create enough clear-cut chances and make their goalkeeper work.

“I don’t think you can put it down as a bad performance, it was pretty dominant yet very similar to Charlton where we lost the game to a set play which has been unlike us from then until now.

“Everything in between we’ve defended set plays well and yet today against another promoted team it’s hurt us.

“We’re very disappointed we didn’t find a way to score more goals.

“We have to move on, you don’t want to get too down on it because there was a lot of good stuff which we can’t throw away.

“We should be beating teams like Luton Town with total respect to them.

“If we have aspirations of being at the top of the table, we need to get results today and we didn’t manage to do that.”

Travis scored his second goal in Rovers colours, an excellent finish from the edge of the box, and Mowbray felt that would give his side the perfect platform to kick on.

He added: “I genuinely thought we would win pretty comfortably at half time but it didn’t happen for us.

“We have to accept it, we huffed and puffed and they defended well, blocked a lot of our shots, frustrated everybody.

“It seemed to take an age to take every throw-in, goal-kick, it was one of them days where the clock was ticking and nothing was happening.

“I don’t want to blame the referee, our own deficiencies today we need to look at and when days like this come again we need to find ways to beat teams like Luton Town.”