admin‘Concerning signs’: Portsmouth boss blasts abject Blues after Sheffield Wednesday humbling – and fires warning to players
Shocking Pompey were beaten at home by Championship strugglers Sheffield Wednesday
John Mousinho blasted dreadful Pompey and hit out at their ‘complacency’ against Sheffield Wednesday.
The Blues slumped to a 2-0 home defeat to the Championship strugglers amid a shockingly bad display which saw them booed at the final whistle.
Certainly their head coach was offering up no excuses afterwards, admitting the Owls were better in every department and thoroughly deserved their first league win of the campaign.
And Mousinho pinpointed ‘concerning signs’ which had crept into their play as the reason behind the shock result.
He told The News: ‘It was a really, really poor result, we got what we deserved and Sheffield Wednesday were far better than us.
‘They outfought us, outran us, out competed, were better on the ball, more clinical and made better decisions in every department. All of those things add up to a 2-0 loss.
‘It’s really difficult to put your finger on it, particularly after the positive performances in the first five games and the extremely positive performance last week when everybody came off the pitch thinking we had made a massive step forward.
‘There are really concerning signs, though. You look at today and there’s a lot of complacency which has crept into the group, thinking this was going to be a much more straightforward game than the others.
‘You try to protect against that, we spoke all week about how unlucky Sheffield Wednesday had been. Yet the complacency is there and the fact we started the game so poorly and made awful decisions.
‘I genuinely thought this group had turned the corner in terms of putting in those sort of performances, it has happened previously but to happen today – after being so solid and so impressive for the majority of the game this season – is disappointing.’
Barry Bannan’s 11th-minute free-kick opened the scoring and then George Brown capitalised on Conor Shaughnessy tearing his hamstring in the build-up for the second goal on 50 minutes.
Pompey were dreadful across the team, with extremely few positive performances among a group which had collected a goalless draw at Southampton in their last outing.
And Mousinho admitted the outcome against Sheffield Wednesday surprised him.
He added: ‘It has surprised me, I was always wary of the fact that, after we had the highs of last week, you come into these games and the mentality isn’t right.
‘Ultimately, the mentality can’t have been right because it’s the same side we saw last week at St Mary’s.
‘There’s a couple of personnel changes, but you can take those out and we still had nine of those that started last week and got nowhere near that level.’
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