What comes next? Colby Bishop and a Portsmouth career at a crossroads
The last season was Colby Bishop’s most testing on the pitch, so what comes next for a man who’s known the kind of challenges most of us will never experience?
Colby Bishop will always have perspective.
Whenever the time arrived for the Pompey striker to reflect on his Championship difficulties last season, he could do so from the perspective of a man who’s thankful to be able to do just that.
‘Hasty’ to write off Bishop - but Fratton career’s at a crossroads
To be back on the football pitch after enduring the trials he’s faced really does put the magic in the Blues’ Magic Man, even amid his 2025-26 challenges.
In fact, his football career which probably saved Bishop’s life, as it led him to undergo the screening that flagged up the enlarged aorta valve requiring open-heart surgery.
So even in the darkest moments of the most testing season of the striker’s career, on the pitch anyway, he could afford context to his Pompey battles.
After all, resolve for the man who turns 30 in November is coming back and playing Championship football three months on from being under the surgeon’s knife.
So it would be hasty in the extreme to write off a figure who’s returned 60 goals in 175 Pompey appearances, after his 25-26 annus horribilis.
Yet of all the issues facing the club’s football operation this summer, many view improving a shot-shy attack - which saw them among the lowest scorers in the top five divisions earlier this year - as the most pressing.
And a fully firing No9 will certainly make that challenge a heck of a lot easier.
Bishop was a long way from that last term, returning four goals in total and just two from open play in the Championship from 42 outings.
The reasons for that, of course, stretch beyond the performances of a player who's returned better than a goal every three games across his four seasons at PO4.
Issues such as losing a man who some experts rate as one of the best crossers of the ball in world football for the majority of the season, was clearly a contributing factor. Josh Murphy’s return and late-season crossing barrage at Stoke underlined that point.
But even Mousinho’s unwavering stance a lack of goals mattered little as long as Bishop was leading the line effectively was tested, with his impact in doing so lessening as his confidence ebbed.
Back-to-back batterings of Charlton and Millwall’s defences in February were reminders of just how effective Bishop remains when performing at his best.
And that has to be the level he returns to next term, with his goal return dropping incrementally from a high of 24 across his four seasons at Fratton.
The News understands Pompey will make bringing in a front-line No9 to vie with Bishop a transfer priority, something they closely looked at doing in January.
Efforts to bring in their chief option in that department were rebuffed, but a Championship-ready option will be in the building by the end of the summer.
With Makenzie Kirk earmarked for a period out on loan, Thomas Waddingham will be the third out-and-out striker - with the Aussie rated more highly by the Blues coaching staff than many realise.
The finishing quality behind that view is something the rest of us haven’t been fortunate to see so far, given the 21-year-old’s fitness frustrations.
With two years to run on the new agreement signed in February of last year, Bishop will return with the rest of his team-mates for pre-season testing in three weeks’ time.
As a leader of this group of players, you can be certain his conditioning will once again set the standard for his peers.
That’s a given and a necessary one at that. With his Fratton career at a crossroads, it will need to be matched with more of the fortitude we know Pompey’s No9 possesses.