Portsmouth boss addresses Fratton Park future of out-of-favour player after Charlton switch

The 26-year-old has moved on loan to Charlton for the remainder of the season as he searches for first-team minutes to rediscover his form.

McIntyre returned to action in September following eight months sidelined by injury, firstly through a broken ankle and then a hamstring tear.

However, despite some good displays after such a lengthy absence, he struggled to maintain consistency and had not been selected for Championship duty since the 4-0 defeat at Derby in mid-December.

Now he’s linked up with Nathan Jones’ League One side and, with a Blues contract until the summer of 2026, Mousinho insists this is not the end of the centre-half's Fratton Park career.

The Blues’ head coach told The News: ‘My big challenge to Tom would be to play as many games as you can at Charlton between now and the end of the year, come back unbelievably fit in pre-season and make sure you’re ready and you are at it, competing for a spot.

‘That doesn’t mean he no longer has a future at Pompey, not at all, that’s why we wanted to loan him out.

‘We bought Tom this time last year and he didn’t play anywhere near as much as he would have liked, but he was fantastic for 53 minutes against Northampton. We were very excited about bringing him in.

‘By Tom’s own admission, I don’t think he has quite hit the heights of what we expected when he first came into the building. There’s a number of reasons behind that, including an eight-month injury lay-off, which hasn’t helped.

‘When you’ve had that amount of time off, you need minutes, you need to play football, you need to get back to the very minimum of the physical peak which we know Tom can get to.

‘It’s up to Tom to go and prove himself. Charlton moved on one of their centre-backs in the window and obviously wanted to take somebody who they think can compete in the first-team.

‘We will keep a close eye on him, it’s not like he’s gone to the depth of nowhere. He’s playing League One football and that’s really, really easy for us to watch.’

After returning to action in September for the 3-0 defeat to West Brom, McIntyre started 10 successive Championship fixtures.

However, he lost his place to Marlon Pack in November, with Pompey’s skipper instead utilised as an emergency central defender in an attempt to tighten things up at the back.

An injury set-back for Regan Poole opened the door once again to the former Reading man, who started at Derby as a consequence.

However, tellingly McIntyre hasn’t featured again in the league after that match, despite being a regular on the bench, and wasn’t included in the squad for last weekend’s goalless draw against Burnley.

Mousinho added: ‘With Conor (Shaughnessy) returning, Rob (Atkinson) coming into the building, plus Ryley, Hayden (Matthews) and Marlon having been ahead of Tom, it looked like opportunities would be restricted.

‘So if you look at the pecking order of where we were, Tom is probably around sixth in line in terms of where we’d be as a starting centre-back.

‘For someone of Tom McIntyre’s calibre and potential, we didn’t want to necessarily see him waste away over the last three months of the season and not play games.

‘He’s still contracted to us next year, we want to see him get football games, we want to see him come back here and compete.

‘We are delighted we’re able to do it at such a big club competing in League One. Hopefully he fits in there and starts quite a few games between now and the end of the season.’