Pompey 0 Newport County 3: Gaffer for a day

Enjoy your birthday on Saturday then, James?

Thankfully I drank so much I forgot what happened in the day!

It didn’t spoil my birthday, though, and I ended up in Emmas Nightclub in Gosport at the end of the night.

Pompey’s performance was awful, we were embarrassing at times, nobody had their heads on the game.

We are so much better than previous years but still nowhere near as good as we should be.

This massive inconsistency is going to kill any chance of promotion. If we perform like we did on Saturday it is not outside the realms of possibility we may finish 11th or 12th. The table is that close.

What are your thoughts on Gary Roberts?

First of all, I don’t like him on the right wing, he’s not a right winger who will fly to the touchline getting balls into the box.

But that first booking was ridiculous, you could see his head had gone. You cannot have senior players behaving like that.

Roberts lost the ball and then kicked out. If you are the talisman of the team you have to hold yourself to high standards.

As for what was judged a dive, if the referee thinks it was simulation fair enough. Although that ref looked about 12 and had a stinker overall.

Who was your man of the match?

Michael Doyle – but no-one really deserved it.

You could see him rollicking Enda Stevens, Danny Hollands and Marc McNulty on occasions to show there is a little bit of fire in there.

As for Michael Smith, he is 6ft 4in and it is appalling to see him fail to win headers and keep getting levered off the ball as much as he does.

For a target man he doesn’t seem to be much of a target.

I know he offers something different, but it doesn’t work with us.

So where next with 10 matches to go?

I believe we’ll definitely get in the play-offs at the very least.

The problem is once we get there we’ll then require three successive wins to go up. Can we do that?

It doesn’t fill you with confidence when we cannot find such consistency at the moment.