‘Adds extra to game’: Portsmouth boss feels gravity of Cardiff City showdown with big prize at stake
John Mousinho acknowledged the significance of his team’s Cardiff City clash as they bid to climb out of the Championship drop zone.
The Pompey boss has refused to shy away from what’s at stake in Wales, as his team aim to pull themselves away from second-tier relegation danger.
Mousinho’s side face the Bluebirds looking to make it back-to-back wins on the road, after the weekend success at fellow strugglers QPR.
It was Pompey’s first win of the campaign with Cardiff also picking up a maximum, as they emphatically dispatched Plymouth 5-0 to improve their own poor start.
Both teams know they could end the evening clear of the bottom three with victory, offering a rich psychological boost after their difficult openings.
Mousinho isn’t hiding from what’s at stake, with the head coach feeling his team have reacted well in similar scenarios in their past two outings.
He said: ‘Whenever you play a side in and around you it feels like a big game. That’s just the nature of it, with where we are in the league at the moment.
‘It’s two sides who picked up decent results at the weekend and it adds a bit extra to the game. I think we have to acknowledge the importance of the game, it’s really important we do that at this stage.
‘We did that well in the past couple of league games. We felt the gravity of the games against Oxford and the weekend and I think we played up to that.
‘We are scrapping with some of these sides at the bottom, so the way to get out of it is to win these sort of games.’
The Pompey squad have been buoyed by putting their winless start behind them on Saturday, but Mousinho feels the QPR result will be placed in context by what happens this week against Cardiff and Sheffield Wednesday.
He added: ‘We’re 10 games in now and under no illusions that, with eight points, we’re not happy with the position we’re in. We want to pick up more points and we want to be in a different league positions.
‘When you’re 10 games in, that’s a good enough indication of how teams have been.A good reflection of where we are is we have that amount of points - and we need to get more.
‘We have to go into these games and make sure we attack them to get positive results.
‘The one thing I’d say is sometimes games individually are built up and I did the same myself against Oxford when it felt like a must-win game at the time.
‘Now we didn’t win that and two weeks down the line we find ourselves not in a disastrous position. It’s a decent position, because we followed Oxford up with a win at QPR.
‘So as long as we’re putting in good performances, like we’ve done relatively consistently, we’ll get enough results.
‘The strength of any result is framed by the next games. So it’s great we won at the weekend and we take the positives and encouragement from it, but we don’t get carried away because we’ve got a job to do against Cardiff.’