Portsmouth boss clarifies key issue of who will have final say on recruitment after new sporting director's arrival

And the Blues boss has made it clear he’s happy to take a collective approach to identifying the additions who can make a difference to his side moving forward.

Hughes was yesterday announced as the club’s new sporting director, arriving from Forest Green Rovers with the remit to drive strategic development at Fratton Park.

Despite the 34-year-old looking at a number of areas, focus will naturally fall on transfer policy and how that area is handled.

There are plenty of examples of the dynamic between a sporting director and the man who looks after first-team affairs being a cause of friction in football.

Cowley sees no reason for that to be the case at Pompey, however.

He said: ‘No, no, no (he doesn’t need to say the buck stops with me on recruitment).

‘We just all want to work together.

‘If we all have the club’s best interests at heart and all work really hard then naturally the club will have success and we will all be happy - because the club will be winning.

‘It’s to work together. It doesn’t matter to us who’s idea it is, it just matters that we come up with the right idea collectively.

‘Likewise, when you get one wrong as you will invariably do, it’s also to take the responsibility.

‘That relationship between the head coach and the director of football is part on an important chain.

‘If we have the best interests of the club at heart we will have natural alignment and natural chemistry as a consequence.

‘I like the idea of cogs in a wheel. No one is more important than anyone else - let’s just get the cogs turning. Then we’ll start moving quicker and have some fun.’

Cowley pointed to his background in football as a key factor in being able to readily divide the labour when it come to searching for players.

He feels he doesn’t have the need to have total control on key football affairs at Fratton Park.

Cowley added: ‘For us, there’s absolutely no ego.

‘I’ve managed from Concord Rangers to Braintree to Lincoln to Huddersfield to here.

‘When you’ve come on the journey and been where we’ve been in the ninth tier, you have to fill the water bottles up and pick the balls and cones up.

‘I can remember going to Havant and Waterlooville five or six years down the road in the Conference South. It would be work all day and go there on Tuesday night, play the game beat them 1-0, travel home and then put the kit in the wash at 3am if we wanted the kit for Saturday!

‘So, for us, we all muck in. I like the feeling that we’re all cogs in the wheel.

‘I used to carry the balls (at Lincoln) and Jimmy Walker used to say to me “Brian Clough wouldn’t have carried the ball”. But for me that’s how it is.’