Portsmouth transfer news: Danny Cowley reveals number of new strikers he wants in summer upon expiry of Coventry and Leicester forwards' loans

Goals have been hard to come by for the Blues this season, with the club’s total of 40 the lowest across League One’s top half.

And with Tyler Walker and George Hirst’s loans expiring at the end of the campaign, coinciding with Aiden O’Brien’s contract ending, the Fratton Park chief is expecting another fresh intake in that department ahead of the 2022-23 term.

Cowley hopes to welcome three to four new additions in that area, after being unable to acquire a permanent long-term signing in January.

And with the clock already ticking, he said the Blues recruitment team were already working hard behind the scenes in order to identify the right fit for next term.

Cowley said: ‘It’s on my mind everyday. Number one and number nine are the defining positions and it’s been incredibly challenging.

‘It’s very hard to replace players in January because you can’t always get value in the market. If we could have done it we would have liked to have brought one forward in January on a permanent basis.

‘In an ideal world I didn’t want to go into the summer having to recruit three, maybe four players, but it wasn’t possible.

‘The options available to us didn’t represent good value to us.

‘There were some other players we really liked who weren’t actually available because their clubs weren’t going to sell in that window.

‘For us, there’s a huge piece of work going on behind the scenes to make sure we’re in a position to be able to recruit the best player who is available for the finances we have.’

Among the seven senior players to depart Fratton Park last month were high-earning forward duo Ellis Harrison and John Marquis.

Although their departures opened funds for Cowley to use in January, their exits left Pompey with just deadline-day signing O’Brien as the club’s only contracted forward. And even he is only signed up until the season’s end.

As things stand, the club will head into the 2022-23 campaign with no conventional strikers on their books.

Yet Cowley added the legacy of Pompey’s 2019 summer outlay was still hampering his own transfer activity.

‘What we all have to remember is John Marquis and Ellis Harrison were brought to this club a couple of years ago for significant transfer fees – somewhere in the region of £1.5m,’ he said.

‘We’ve had to try and replace them and we probably didn’t have those fees (in return).

‘What we have to remember is when the club bought those players, they’d sold players previous to that and created the transfer fees to bring them in.

‘We weren’t quite in that position to be able to do that.

‘So we’ve had to use the loan market to try and affect that position. That in itself is a challenge of course.’

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