'Ruthless': Portsmouth boss rues big first-half moment as Ipswich Town capitalise to topple Blues
Pompey slipped to a first away defeat of the season to Ipswich following a 2-1 loss
John Mousinho rued Minhyeok Yang’s crucial first-half miss as ‘ruthless’ Ipswich capitalised to claim a 2-1 success.
The Blues were trailing 1-0 to Jaden Philogene’s early opener when, in the 33rd minute, Adrian Segecic fed the ball into the left-hand channel and into the Spurs loanee’s path.
However, with just Alex Palmer to beat, the youngster took one touch too many and his eventual shot was smothered.
Within eight minutes, Ipswich had doubled their lead through George Hirst and, despite Marlon Pack’s stoppage-time consolation, there was no coming back.
Mousinho told The News: ‘We are not going to take every chance, but certainly a chance as clear-cut as that we created all of a sudden it’s not 1-1 and you go 2-0 down.
‘That showed the ruthlessness Ipswich had with some of the players they’ve got and it then left us too much of a mountain to climb.
‘I’m disappointed with the result obviously. If you contrast the two halves, we took too long to get going and it took us going a goal down to settle in the game - after that there wasn’t a huge amount in it.
‘The timing of the second goal was really disappointing. The big takeaway is we waited to go two goals down to actually play, to actually show we are not a bad side at all. After the second half, we were a lot better, much improved, it was a really decent 45 minutes and we got the goal too late, ultimately.
‘You come away to a place like this, a fantastic side we are playing against and there is a bit of frustration and disappointment that we didn’t come away with at least with the point.’
Mousinho had made five changes to the side which lost so abjectly against Sheffield Wednesday, including handing a debut to Josef Bursik in goal.
The outcome was Pompey’s first defeat on the road this season, yet the head coach was taking plenty of encouragement from their second half showing at Portman Road.
He added: ‘I was impressed with the second-half performance to be honest, particularly when we made the changes, Marlon came on and was excellent, it was a thoroughly-deserved goal.
‘It’s a really strange one. If we had shown a bit more of that in the first-half and given the ball away doing some of the things we did in the second half and the ball ended up in the back of the net, fine we will live with it.
‘But by doing what we did in the first half just gave ourselves too much to do.’