BREAKING: Portsmouth handed significant injury boost over midfielder

The midfielder was expected to be sidelined for five months after damaging his knee on the opening day of the season.

However, following surgery on Thursday, the Blues are now confident the former Crewe back will be back before Christmas.

Surgeons opted to shave off part of Lowery’s meniscus, rather than repairing it, thereby handing him a new time frame of 12 weeks.

Effectively, that could see the 25-year-old returning two months earlier than anticipated – and this side of Christmas.

Mousinho told The News: ‘With Tom, we’ve had good news in terms of the surgery which happened last Thursday.

‘It’s actually going to be 12 weeks, which is still quite a long time, but initially we feared it was going to be five months. We couldn't tell until he’d actually had the surgery and opened up his meniscus.

‘What they have done is, rather than repair his meniscus, they've just shaved a bit off.

‘When you repair the meniscus, that means you’re immobile for at least eight weeks and then you get back into it. Shaving it off means it’s much better in recovery.

‘So no longer are we looking at 20 weeks with him, he is coming back sooner than we thought.

‘Tom is as ecstatic as you can be after knee surgery, but is more encouraged after being told he has 12 weeks out rather than the alternative.

‘So we are looking at three months from now, which means he’ll be back before Christmas.’

Lowery missed almost six months of last season with a recurring hamstring injury.

His latest set-back is entirely unrelated, forcing the midfielder off at half-time of the League One curtain-raiser against Bristol Rovers earlier this month.

Pompey are continuing to weigh up whether to return to the transfer market to replace him, having declared summer business was likely to be over.

Mousinho has already ruled out bringing in another centre-forward to cover for Kusini Yengi’s absence, which is expected to be missing for up to eight weeks.

Pompey’s head coach added: ‘We are still not sure on (replacing) Tom, that one is ongoing, we aren’t 100 per cent whether we were going to do something.

‘We are juggling a lot of balls at the moment.’