‘Need to shake things up’: Portsmouth boss facing one of his toughest managerial challenges
Pompey face a big return to Championship action against Millwall, as they aim to arrest their slide down the table. John Mousinho speaks to The News about the battle of turning the season around at Fratton Park.
John Mousinho hinted at changes to Pompey’s approach as he faced one of his biggest battles in management.
But the Blues boss is determined to keep his side’s fall down the Championship table in perspective, as he gave a revealing insight into his thinking ahead of the return to action against Millwall.
Mousinho: ‘We need to shake things up ‘
Mousinho’s men are on a run of six league matches without a win and just a single success in their past 11 outings, putting the brakes on a positive start to the campaign.
Only last season’s opening nine games without victory is a more difficult spell in Mousinho’s 34-month Fratton tenure, with few seeing such a run coming at this stage of the season.
Mousinho broke down the recent winless run and offered an even-handed assessment of performances, while acknowledging the need to switch things up.
He said: ‘It’s an interesting one, we’re trying to keep a lot of perspective on it.
‘The biggest problem in isolation through the run has been the Birmingham game, in terms of the winless run.
‘Leicester was one of our best performances of the season, Coventry we can take it on the chin we were beaten by a better side and on the day against Stoke we were actually the better team, who should have put their chances away and got punished at the back end of it.
‘You then fast forward to Birmingham which was 100 per cent a problem, a really poor performance and not good enough. The confidence probably took a bit of a knock there going into Wrexham, where we were much more solid and couldn’t put the ball in the net.
‘Hull was harder to assess. There was some frustrating bits, some good bits and you come away thinking we’re not miles away but small margins are killing us.
‘So we go through that group of games drawing two and not winning any of the others.
‘It’s a very, very interesting one for us because we don’t feel we’re a million miles away, but clearly in terms of results we’re not picking up as many points as we need to, we’re not scoring as many goals as we need to score and we need to change things. We do need to shake things up a little bit.’
Pompey boss positive ahead of busy period
Pompey’s drop in form follows a single loss from their first five Championship games, which had fans positively looking up the table in encouraging fashion. Mousinho knows how quickly things can change, however, at the start of three games in eight days and six league fixtures across three weeks,
He added: ‘We have to remember we haven’t become a bad side overnight after the Leicester game. After that game we were talking about how far we could go as a football and a team.
‘We haven’t picked up the results since then but we haven’t changed as a team, so it’s about balance and about making sure we’re fair and realistic about the situation.
‘So we’re being very realistic, but also very positive going into the next batch of games.’