John Mousinho Delivers Squad After Portsmouth Team Suffered 2-1 Loss To Preston North End

Portsmouth head coach John Mousinho delivered a scathing assessment of his team after Saturday’s 2-1 defeat to Preston North End,

The visitors looked set to take a point away from Deepdale after Colby Bishop equalised on 83 minutes, shortly after Ryan Porteous’ opener. But, Stefan Thordarson produced a moment of magic in the dying embers to clinch the victory for Paul Heckingbottom’s men.

Post-match, ex-PNE man Mousinho said: “I’m not going to sit in here and talk about how good the performance was for 85 of the 95 minutes played. It was but, ultimately, my focus is on what happened after we got the equaliser and the performance after that was abysmal. I’m absolutely furious.

“I turned around to the bench after about two minutes of getting the equaliser and I said ‘We’ve just completely lost our minds’. You equalise, 1-1, away from home against Preston – a good Championship side – take the point.

“We could still catch them on the counter attack so there was a heavy chance that we’d go and score the winner. But we just went completely off script. That was the biggest thing – we went completely off script, started doing the wrong things on the press and the goal is the worst goal we’ve conceded this season.

“I have banged on for 38 games and about 100 games since I’ve been in charge about fouling early, stopping sides from having the opportunity to break on us quickly. But we decide to do otherwise. (Brady) gets the ball on the half way line, turns out of four players; next thing you know the ball’s in the back of the net.

“And that is 100 per cent our fault. I can’t deal with sides scoring goals against us and losses where the players are doing their own thing and not doing what I’ve asked them to do. I thought we were really good in the first half, decent enough away performance.

“Very, very solid, frustrated Preston, had the best of the opportunities. I don’t think Nico (Schmid) had to make a save – a couple of set-pieces we had to defend – but we had some really good opportunities we didn’t take advantage of.

“Second half Preston obviously made the four changes at half-time which changed the game, but still I thought we were really comfortable. I didn’t look at the game and think we were under a huge amount of pressure, sometimes from set-pieces and yeah, just completely shot ourselves in the foot.”