West Brom 5-1 Pompey: John Mousinho's post-match reaction

The News, Portsmouth

Pompey boss John Mousinho shares his thoughts on Pompey's 5-1 defeat to West Brom at the Hawthorns

Transcript

00:00and the entire game changes. I was really, really pleased with our start today. I thought

00:05we looked like a solid outfit, 20-25 minutes in, we had the better chances, we created

00:09more, had a couple of shots and then we went a goal down, which is fine, I can live with

00:13that. We go a goal down and Niko will be disappointed and then we just went under after that and

00:18there's no better example than the second or third goal, where the second goal right

00:22in front of us here, we've got two right-backs going in on the left winger and we just lose

00:27the challenge. When you lose challenges against the likes of Johnson, you're going to get

00:33punished. Same for the third goal, we lose the challenge and they break us and the players

00:36run past us and it just seems to be something that is happening far too often. When we go

00:41a goal down away from home, confidence drops and we don't have the ability at the minute

00:46to dig in and find something a bit extra, like we have been doing at home.

00:51What was the thinking behind the team selection today?

00:54We just had to make changes, the schedule has been absolutely brutal for us. There's

01:00a fact there's no other side in the Championship that will be facing this at the moment and

01:03that's fine, it is what it is, but with those two games that we had called off in a week,

01:07I think at the back end of November, it's just become too difficult for us to sustain

01:12the same team week after week after week and what we've ended up doing is going into the

01:17Blackburn game, the Middlesbrough game and then the Stoke game with fairly similar line-ups,

01:22not really been able to make those changes and with the game in mind on Tuesday, it was

01:26something we just had to do, far too high of an injury risk, players being tired and

01:31all that and it's just one of those, we've had these two games rearranged in January

01:35and it's really hurt us.

01:36Can you sympathise with fans who have spent their time and wanted to come here and might

01:38have been disappointed to see the line-up?

01:41Yes, absolutely. I hope they understand why we've done it and I hope also that the players

01:48understand that I still expect more of them. There are players in there, I think you take

01:51Christian Sadio out of it, who hasn't had a huge amount of minutes in the past few weeks.

01:55Every single one of those other players that we've made the changes has had minutes, has

01:59had significant time on the pitch, has started a lot of games, so I don't think there's any

02:02excuse for the players not to be able to do that and ultimately, if we have a squad, we've

02:07got a squad there for a reason, we need to be able to rotate it and be better than that,

02:10so yes, I completely get it but we have to be able to cope with that because we're not

02:16going to be able to wheel the same players out week in, week out.

02:19Do you say much to the players in the rest of them after a game like that?

02:22No, I've said very little because I think it's difficult to unpick what went wrong from

02:26the sidelines. There's loads of things that I saw that I think we need to do better at

02:30but the best thing to do is to watch it back and go over it again on Monday.

02:32How frustrating was the second quarter to watch for you?

02:35Yes, I just thought it was awful. I don't know what we were doing, we just made really,

02:38really poor decisions. The most disappointing thing for me actually was we started to lose

02:43challenges and not track runners. So, lose challenges, don't track runners, again, we

02:47can go and watch the second and third goal back as much as we want. We lost two challenges.

02:51They're not challenges we would have lost on Tuesday, they weren't challenges we would

02:54have lost on Saturday. We were really willing to put our foot in on those occasions but

02:58we didn't do it here today.

02:59Thanks, John.

03:00Cheers, Andy.

03:01All good?

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