Portsmouth boss' calming message to the Fratton Faithful as he shrugs off rare set-back

The Blues suffered a rare defeat when they went down 1-0 at non-league Chesterfield on Sunday amid a poor performance.

In terms of 90-minute matches, it represented their first loss in all competitions since March, spanning 31 fixtures.

Their only other defeat during that period came via a Carabao Cup penalty shoot-out with Peterborough in August having drawn 1-1.

And despite Sunday’s disappointment, Mousinho has pledged not to get carried away as the Blues bid to bounce back at Leyton Orient in the Bristol Street Motors Trophy on Tuesday night (7pm).

He told The News: ‘I don’t think there’s any point in overreacting.

‘We don’t overreact when we win games, we want to try to stay nice and calm and composed, so why do anything differently when we lose?

‘Losing games has been few and far between, we haven’t lost one inside 90 minutes since March, so I don’t think there’s any point in overreacting. The acid test for the lads is how they react to this – and the biggest thing for us is the league and EFL Trophy.

‘I didn’t have to say a huge amount to the group afterwards. I was massively disappointed, but they know what’s gone wrong, they were not pleased with their own performance.

‘If we are losing games week in, week out, then we’ll have a proper examination of what’s going wrong. We do that anyway to make sure there’s nothing we’ve missed.

‘When you lose once in 31 games (within 90 minutes), it isn’t the end of the world. If you perform like that consistently, of course you’re going to be punished, so we have to make sure we sharpen up in a few areas and come back strongly at Leyton Orient.

‘No disrespect to the FA Cup, we went there with a full-strength side, so you could see how we respect the competition, but if we’re going to lose a game, this was the one.’

Despite Mousinho’s refusal to dwell on that Chesterfield result, he remains unhappy over that Pompey display.

He added: ‘One of the things I saw after about a minute of the second half was Michael Jacobs run past six players and waltz in our box, that’s just not good enough, we can’t have it.

‘It happened time and time again, it felt at times we were getting overrun, and we must do better.’