'Unrecognisable': Defiant Portsmouth boss John Mousinho's inquest into shock Stoke hammering
Pompey were ‘unrecognisable’ to a shell-shocked John Mousinho - now he has vowed to delve into their psyche to uncover why.
It’s not been 24 hours since a surprise Stoke hammering inflicted the Blues’ heaviest defeat for 16 years and strengthened relegation fears.
Certainly Mousinho never saw the 6-1 demolition coming, having previously applauded much-improved displays against promotion-chasing pair Burnley and Sheffield United in recent weeks.
The damning result comfortably represented the team’s worst performance during his 20 months as head coach - and ensures Pompey have yet to win any of their opening nine matches in all competitions this season.
Now the challenge is for Mousinho to uncover why the shock annihilation occurred.
He told The News: ‘You look at the decisions we made for the second and third goals. We have a throw-in by the dug-out for the second goal, we lose a battle, we don’t track runners and the ball’s in the back of the net. I can half-live with that one.
‘For the third goal, we’re down to 10 men, Zak Swanson is off the pitch with a head injury and, rather than making sure we are nice and secure and go into half-time at 2-1, we play backwards. Then we play into pressure, completely forgetting we have 10 men and - that’s all decision-making.
‘I have to get into the minds of those players and figure out why they are making those decisions. We have 10 men, we are away from home, we’re about to go in at half-time 2-1 down, so let’s not invite pressure on ourselves for a pass which isn’t even there.
‘I’m not sure why we are thinking that. I have to really break that down with the boys, getting into their heads to see if it’s something I am telling them or whether something I’m giving them.
‘We were unrecognisable in terms of what we’ve seen. Take those three examples of the goals - without even going into the goals in the second half - and you can see what the issues are. We just need to know why and how to solve them.’
Mousinho used the overnight coach journey home from the Potteries to pour over match footage and pinpoint culprits and culpability for the 6-1 defeat.
Speaking on Thursday morning ahead of meeting the players for training in preparation for Oxford United, he believes he has uncovered the answers.
He added: ‘In the moment you get a very, very good feel of it and, after the game, the post-match summary was pretty accurate, but then you watch it back and realise specifically what went wrong in certain moments.
‘Sometimes you don’t have time to process that, when we weren’t doing the right things, particularly when we were quite far away from the three goals scored in the second half.
‘It is obviously my job to feed that out, it’s very difficult to know exactly why it happened, if we did we would have changed things before they happened.’