'I thought it was for the best': Portsmouth boss defends shock team selection in dismal Bristol City defeat
John Mousinho reflected on his shock Pompey team selection and insisted: I thought it was the best thing to do.
The Blues boss surprisingly dropped leading scorer Callum Lang, Josh Murphy, Freddie Potts and Zak Swanson for the trip to Bristol City.
Instead he handed recalls to Paddy Lane, Sammy Silvera, Terry Devlin and Owen Moxon - only for awful Pompey to find themselves 3-0 down after 35 minutes during a dreadful start.
There was no coming back for the Blues, who have now slumped back into the relegation zone to end 2024 on a dreadful note.
And afterwards, the head coach explained why he made the changes.
He told The News: ‘I just think we needed to freshen things up. The output over the past few weeks has been so high with the game we had last weekend, the game Thursday and the back-to-back travel.
‘Previously when we’ve had that back-to-back travel in the second game, we have looked a bit leggy, so I thought it was the best thing to do to try to freshen things up.
‘If you look at the players we brought back in, everybody apart from Sammy have played minutes. Paddy, Max and Terry have played plenty of minutes recently in a competitive side when we’ve done well.
‘I thought that was the best thing to do. There are a couple of things we need to guard against. We need to guard against injuries with the fact we’ve got the game on Wednesday as well as another game on Sunday, with the long travel up to Sunderland.
‘That’s part of it, we need to make sure we can rely on the squad to come in and make those changes when we need to do it.
‘The ones that were left out were players we have gone with time and time again, but sometimes for the third game we’ve had players that look a bit leggy and exhausted.
‘With the game coming up on Wednesday, we just wanted to keep things fresh, we had more than enough to still be competitive (against Bristol City), but unfortunately weren’t.’
Mousinho eventually introduced Lang, Murphy and Potts off the bench in the 64th minute, yet the damage had already been done.
And he is adamant it was never a case of not using any of them during the fixture,
He added: ‘We never go into games with pre-planned substitutions, it was just what I thought at the moment.’