Pompey v Wycombe: The opposition view

There is a decent squad there – but it’s been decimated by injury.

When it was put together by Gareth Ainsworth there was quite a lot of optimism

Signings like Adebayo Akinfenwa, Dayle Southwell and Myles Weston were seen as quite exciting compared to last season.

There was a lot of attacking intent, but key players have picked up injuries – and the amount of them would hurt any team.

So it’s been quite a struggle and it’s taken the wind out of their sails early on in the season.

They were unlucky to lose to Crawley on the opening day and then managed to beat Grimsby.

The thought was they were going to kick on from there, but they’ve lost all these players and it hasn’t happened.

It may only be six games in but they are third from bottom and Ainsworth is talking about a relegation fight already.

He’s saying they need to make sure they don’t get sucked into that before the injured players return.

So it’s a bit of a worry to hear him speaking like that already.

They made it to the play-offs the season before last and last year were in and out of the top seven all season before dropping away.

What annoyed a lot of fans was Ainsworth set a 61-point target.

It was a case of getting to that total and assessing the way forward from there.

As soon as they got there, though, they didn’t win another game for the rest of the season. They switched off and ended up slipping right out of the picture.

Ainsworth seems to be dividing opinion quite a bit at the moment.

He seems to have made a conscious effort to stop banging on about the budget.

It’s a difficult one because there’s a huge element of truth in talking about not having money to spend.

Last season Wycombe had the third lowest budget in the league and one of the sides – Dagenham & Redbridge – got relegated

He would always harp on about it and, even if he had the right to, people thought it’s not helping to attract fans and will smack of a lack of ambition.

Over the summer he was linked with the Blackburn job and is seen as a up-and-coming manager, though.

There has been rumblings of discontent from the fans but the chairman here loves him to bits.

So there’s no doubt his job would be safe unless the worst was to happen and Wycombe did end up getting relegated.