Portsmouth Boss John Mousinho Blasted His Players After Exiting The FA Cup

Portsmouth boss John Mousinho has blasted his players performances after exiting the FA Cup with a 2-0 defeat to League One side Wycombe Wanderers.

The Championship strugglers made the trip to Adams Park for a Friday night cup clash with the Chairboys, who are currently firmly in the mix for automatic promotion to the second tier.

Mousinho fielded a rotated starting XI for the game, taking the opportunity to rest some of his most important Portsmouth players whilst also handing opportunities to a number of fringe players to make an impression.

Wycombe boss Matt Bloomfield also made a number of changes to the team that lost 1-0 to Huddersfield Town on Tuesday night, but it would be the League One outfit who would book their place in the draw for the Fourth Round.

Two first half goals from Brandon Hanlan and Sonny Bradley would be all that was required to topple Portsmouth, and Pompey boss Mousinho made no secret of the fact that he was far from impressed with what he saw from his players.

Portsmouth boss tears into his players after FA Cup defeat to Wycombe Wanderers

Speaking with The News post-match, Mousinho was in no mood to find excuses for the result or individual performances of those in a Portsmouth shirt.

Mousinho said: “It was really poor in pretty much every aspect. The result is the result, that’s one thing, I can take losing, I can take being knocked out of the FA Cup, it wasn’t necessarily our priority this year – but we should have been far more competitive than we were.

“The most disappointing thing for me was the way we reacted to going a goal down. We were by far the better side in the opening 15 minutes, missed a chance and then Wycombe put their first chance into the back of the net which we didn’t defend properly.

“We didn’t respond off the back of that, it was just really, really poor. Sometimes you’re going to lose goals in games and go a goal down – and we were really poor after that.

“We have to protect the players, we left a few of them at home. The most important thing was we didn’t want to pick up any injuries, so we deliberately left some of the key players out. I still think we should have been much more competitive having made those nine changes, I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t have been able to do that.

“There are loads of reasons why we didn’t, we didn’t do anything particularly well after that opening 15 minutes, we stopped competing and some of the decisions we made on the ball, the lack of technique and the way we gave the ball away was just awful.

“I was watching players who I know are good players but just kept giving the ball away and then we weren’t winning our challenges. The second goal sums the game up for me. We left Sonny Bradley, unmarked, untouched, have a free header inside the six-yard box.”

John Mousinho needs character from his Portsmouth players ahead of tough Championship run

A tough stretch of league fixtures awaits Portsmouth over the coming weeks, as the club look to avoid making an instant return to League One following last season’s title-winning triumph.

Pompey will be taking on a host of Premier League promotion contenders over the next month, as well as a big game towards the bottom of the division when they welcome Stoke City to Fratton Park on 22 January.

The next handful of weeks will potentially be season-defining for Portsmouth, as they face an incredibly testing run of fixtures where points could be at a real premium.

If Mousinho’s men are to emerge from this gauntlet with enough points in hand to keep them above the dreaded dotted line, then the 38-year-old boss is going to require a significant amount more character than what his players showed at Adams Park.

This FA Cup exit will allow them to solely focus on Championship survival, however, but that will only be a benefit to them if they make the most of it.