'I will sleep tonight': Danny Cowley's praise for Portsmouth side - despite losing unbeaten record in Ipswich loss

The Blues slipped to a 3-2 defeat at Ipswich, with Wes Burns’ header settling the contest in the 81st minute in front of 28,244 at Portman Road.

In truth, the hosts deserved their triumph, particularly from a first half during which they should have found themselves comfortably ahead rather than level at the interval.

It represented a maiden loss after 10 league matches for Cowley’s men, who have enjoyed a fine start to the campaign.

Yet, despite the defeat, he was encouraged by his players’ battling performance on a testing afternoon in Suffolk.

Pompey’s head coach told The News: ‘I will put my head on the pillow tonight and think the work ethic was good, the attitude of the group was good, the togetherness as a group was as excellent as ever.

‘I thought we showed resilience and determination. All those prerequisites you can’t give the players, I think our group have that. I will sleep tonight.

‘In terms of the performance, there are always areas for us to improve. When you play against top teams you get instant feedback, of course.

‘We go behind and suffer for the first half in a period and stayed in the game, we stayed together and showed that resilience I talked about.

‘We then found our goal and tweaked a couple of bits and found a better rhythm in the second half without being free-flowing.

‘It felt like we are in a good place in the game, respectful of the fact we were against a top team.

‘Then their (second) goal came from nowhere, which hurt us – then we responded, which is a really important quality.

‘They have a never-say-die attitude, you have to kind of kill us to beat us and we never know when we are beaten.

‘Then the third goal goes in and sometimes in football you have small margins, sometimes the break of the ball, and it wasn’t quite with us against Ipswich.’

Pompey players were frustrated late on when some of the Portman Road crowd refused to give the ball back with their side in sight of victory.

That resulted in a total of seven minutes of time added on, although the visitors still failed to find a way through.

Cowley added: ‘It was hard after that (the third goal) because we couldn’t get the ball on the pitch and got caught up in the emotion and frustration.

‘Instead of criticising the crowd, I would rather be really proud that we are in the third tier of English football and there are 28,000 here.

‘It’s just an amazing achievement – and it doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world.’

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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