The blows are particularly brutal considering the calibre of players impacted. Indeed, Callum Lang, Conor Shaughnessy and Jordan Williams would all be included in the Blues’ strongest starting XI.
With Lang now ruled out for the remainder of the season after his Oxford United set-back, John Mousinho insists Pompey will ‘definitely review’ how they approach muscular issues.
However, with increased physical demands on players in an era involving more high-intensity running and the present state of heavy pitches, he believes hamstring injuries are often difficult to prevent.
And while he points at rotation as a possible solution – the answer isn’t quite that straightforward.
Mousinho told The News: ‘I’m sure hamstring injuries can be prevented. The way you prevent it is to not sprint, that’s not me being facetious, that’s just the way it is.
‘Bodies aren’t necessarily designed to do what we are doing at the moment – which is churning out 46 games in a real-high intensity.
‘The intensity of football over the past five years has stepped up massively to the eye and also to what I am seeing in terms of the physical data. Our baseline measure for how much we run every game is up this year from where it was last year.
‘It’s also high in the league and we need to make sure we maintain that because we certainly can guarantee one thing – we run and we run at speed.
‘How can we prevent it? We have to think about squad rotation at times. We obviously did that at West Brom to try to protect Jordan, we felt he was absolutely fine coming on. Unfortunately, he picked up the injury there.
‘We tried to protect Callum as much as possible, but there’s no way I would have left him out at Oxford or subbed him off at that point. With Shocks, we weighed up everything, we had been sensible enough and he felt fine going into the Cardiff game, no issues, then overstretched for a ball.
‘We’ll definitely review where we are. If you look across the leagues and the Championship, we aren’t any better or worse than the majority of the teams.
‘We are wary of muscular injuries in training, but we can control training sessions, you just can’t control what’s going on in games. We have the data coming through, if anything flags which we think needs us to make a change then we’ll do it, but we aren’t going to be obsessed with that.
‘I see what I can see on the pitch, I know when players are tired and I know when they are flagging. There were no warning signings for any of those three players.
‘If you ask me whether I would make those three decisions again, I probably wouldn’t have brought Jordan on.
‘But I would have started Shocks because he scored the winning goal in a massive win for us – and I’d have done the same with Callum because of the contribution he had in that win.’
Another potential influence on the number of recent hamstring problems is the state of playing surfaces at this time of years.
Certainly Mousinho believes an increase in February rainfall compared to other years have left pitches heavy, thereby making players more susceptible to muscular injuries.
Although far from it being solely a Fratton Park or Oxford United issue, the head coach is convinced the vast majority of Championship clubs and leagues below have been affected.
Pompey’s head coach added: ‘Pitches do have an impact. There’s been so much rain this year, it has been such a wet winter, pitches everywhere seem really heavy.
‘Whenever you flick on the Championship highlights, you’ll see that some of the pitches at the moment, up and down the country, are really struggling.
‘That’s no slight on Oxford’s pitch. I played there for five years and there were times in February when it was immaculate because of the weather they’d had through the season. It’s one of those things where there is nothing anyone can do about it.
‘Even if you look at Fratton Park now compared to where it was last season, because of the weather, we’re suffering a lot more now. Yet I think that’s going to be rife for all the pitches up and down the country.
‘Sometimes pitches look great by the way, but they’re not the best. A lot of pitches are struggling at the minute.’
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