Breaking: Portsmouth await news on former Fulham man after freak training ground injury
Pompey are anxiously waiting to discover the extent of damage to Ibane Bowat following a freak injury.
The recent recruit from Fulham has been left on crutches after damaging his knee while taking a shot in training on Tuesday.
John Mousinho insists there was no contact with another player, with Bowat in space as he lined up his goal attempt.
The 21-year-old has still to make his Pompey since arriving on deadline day, having been subsequently named as an unused substitute against Sunderland.
And in a week when Conor Shaughnessy and Tom McIntyre have returned to training and are under consideration for West Brom, the Blues have now lost another centre-half to injury.
Mousinho told The News: ‘Ibane felt his knee when he went to take a shot in training the other day, so we’re just waiting for the scan results and seeing what that is. Hopefully it isn’t too bad.
‘He is on crutches, but that’s usually one of those things with the knee. Sometimes it can be nothing, sometimes it can be bad news, we don’t really know yet, we’ll wait and see.
‘It was while shooting and there’s nothing we could really do about that. We looked back at the footage on Tuesday and there was no malice or contact or anything like that.
‘We always look back at everything we do and try to take a pulse of where we are at. If we’re training too hard, if we are doing too much, if we are doing too little - sometimes that can be a cause of injury as well - and then go from there.
‘We’ll have a look, we’ll review everything and we’ll see what the extent of the injury is.’
The latest blow comes at a time when Mousinho was toasting a quadruple injury boost, with Shaughnessy, McIntyre, Jacob Farrell and Josh Murphy all back.
In addition, Regan Poole continues to make excellent progress and the Blues’ head coach previously pinpointed Burnley as a possible return.
He added: ‘We thought we picked up a fair few injuries last year and we’ve done it so far this season as well.
‘Hopefully, with the boys coming back, we’ll be in a much better place over the next couple of weeks. As it stands, over the last couple we’ve actually had many more bodies around training than we anticipated.’