'I have got it wrong': Portsmouth boss John Mousinho's honest appraisal after Birmingham City embarrassment

John Mousinho pledged for plenty of soul searching after Pompey’s St Andrew’s debacle and insisted: I have got it wrong.

Birmingham thumped the visitors 4-0 in an abject performance from the visitors in comfortably their worst display of the season.

The scoreline should have been even heavier had it not been for an early Josef Bursik penalty save and then a number of misses from Chris Davies’ side during a rampant second half.

Connor Ogilvie was missing through illness, while Conor Chaplin and Colby Bishop were dropped to the bench as Mousinho sought to arrest successive defeats.

Instead it was a woeful display from Pompey and Mousinho questioned whether there had been a ‘breakdown in communication’ with his players.

He told The News: ‘I’ll get angry as the night goes on. The overriding emotion right now is I can be extremely angry, but, ultimately, it’s my responsibility for what we put out on the pitch, how we perform, the players we have, the players we have out there and what they have done.

‘Just as a snapshot, if we’ve started a game in that way for the first 5-10 minutes and the players have done the opposite to what I have asked them to do, I have got it wrong. I must have delivered the message wrong.

‘I must be in a position where there's either a breakdown in communication or we’ve got players that can’t listen or aren’t willing to listen - and I have to find the solution to that.

‘We talk about coming away from home to a place like St Andrew’s, I know it’s going to be a hostile atmosphere, I know the home form here is incredibly good off the back of some disappointing results, Birmingham are obviously going to come out and really try to dominate the game.

‘It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that we don’t want to put ourselves under pressure, we want to try to turn them, we want to try to make sure we earn a bit of space.

‘The first thing we do is the ball goes back to the goalkeeper, we try to play short and try to play out.

‘We spoke about that today, we spoke about that on Friday on the training pitch, so that’s an issue I have to try to correct.’

Overall three set-pieces were conceded by the Blues, emerging as a growing weakness about their play.

Yet all round it was an embarrassing performance - and Mousinho is adamant the defeat could have been even heavier.

He added: ‘I don’t think it's going to take a rocket scientist to work out that we deserved everything we got, it could have been more to be honest.

‘We started the game extremely poorly, we just gave ourselves a mountain to climb, the goal was coming. Birmingham missed that penalty early on and the next thing you know the ball is in the back of the net from a set-piece.

‘Set-pieces are an issue, but it’s the build-up to it and what actually leads to us conceding the set-pieces as well.’