'It's really low' - Portsmouth boss makes honest squad admission after Bristol City defeat

However, the Blues boss remains confident his troops can quickly put their Ashton Gate troubles behind them and bounce back against Swansea on Wednesday.

A much-changed Pompey side suffered its 10th defeat of the season and returned to the Championship relegation zone after another away day to forget. The visitors trailed 3-0 at the break against Liam Manning's Robins, and showed no signs of turning it around in the second half with the game already sewn up by the hosts.

That will no doubt have been a huge disappointment to the 3,333 Blues fans who made their way to the West Country in the hope of celebrating a much-needed win on the road following Thursday's controversial defeat at Watford.

It wasn't to be, though, leaving Mousinho with the unenviable task of lifting his troops for Wednesday's visit of the Swans to Fratton Park.

Mousinho is confident he can do that, having already reminded his players how good they can be. Although, he admitted he's still struggling to work out his side's inconsistencies this term.

When asked by BBC Radio Solent about the mood in the dressing room following the 3-0 defeat to City, the head coach responded: 'It's really low. Naturally, really low.

'I don't know how else you can be after that game - I want it to be low, I don't want anyone to be pleased with that. It was low at half-time and it was low after the game.

'It's now a really interesting one for me to try to pick the bones out of it because, again, we've come into the game off the back of a really good performance on Thursday (against Watford) and proabably our best performance of the season against Coventry on Saturday, so I don't see how that has necessarily happened. It's hapened again and we've got to find a better way of dealing with it.'

Mousinho added: 'I'm confident we can do that (bounce back). I'm confident we wil do that on New Year's Day.

'One of the things that we said to the lads in there (the changing room) is, when we're at home and we've got the crowd behind us, when we get going and start pressing sides, we're aggressive, we get games going from early on, we look a really good team.

'There's no reason why we can't do that away from home, it's exactly the same game, you're still playing the same players, but for some reason we haven't quite found the answer in terms of how we do that.

'But we have to bounceback and be back on it on Wednesday. becuase we've got no time to rest. We've got games, games, games and more games and we've got to pick up as many points as we can'