Portsmouth boss responds to ‘injury prone’ jibes as midfielder closes in on return

Tom Lowery doesn’t deserve to be tagged as an ‘injury prone’ footballer.

That is the forceful claim of Pompey boss John Mousinho, as the midfielder closes in on a return to action.

Lowery is nearing a comeback from almost four months, after a knee injury suffered on the opening day of the League One campaign against Bristol Rovers.

That comes off the back of an injury-hit maiden campaign for the 25-year-old, where well-documented issues restricted him to 21 appearances.

The amount of time the Crewe signing has spent in the treatment room has led to some questioning Lowery’s fitness record.

Mousinho admitted avoiding a repeat of his old issues is something Pompey are aware of, but labelling him as injury prone is unfair.

He said: ‘Tom’s maybe taken a bit of stick, not directly, but there’s that accusation that he’s had that injury record.

‘But I don’t see that as a concern at all, I know how hard he works in the gym. He’s done everything possible to get back quickly and keep himself fit.

‘So we’ll keep monitoring that and slowly introduce back and not push him too far.

‘One of the things we want to do with Tom is make sure he comes back and stays back in the side.

The big concern for us last season was the minor niggles which kept him out and turned into more major issues. When he first came back it was groin/hip/hamstring issues that he’d had that were just holding him back.

‘So we wanted to really slowly integrate back into the side, which I thought we did pretty successfully towards the back end of last year. So I think we would’ve been disappointed if he’d come back this season and the injury had been similar to what it had been last season, but it was a meniscus problem in the knee.

‘There was very little we could do about that and it was just one of those things which happens in football. So I’ve no problem with that in terms of searching for any answers.’