Portsmouth boss’ damning Shrewsbury assessment as he highlights cost of weak performance

Marlon Pack salvaged a point with eight minutes left in a 1-1 draw at New Meadow, but that failed to paper over the cracks of a showing which was well below par.

Mousinho accepted that was the case and felt his players were short of the levels reached at times in a largely positive tenure to date.

With six points now the gap to the play-off, he thinks Pompey will live to regret their showing.

He said: ‘I was pleased with the energy, effort and endeavour towards the end, but the performance wasn’t good enough. We have to look at ourselves and make sure we’re better consistently.

‘I think we will come away and rue this result in the final standings. The standards weren’t up to what we’ve shown at times in the two-and-a-half months since I’ve been here.

‘When you look at the games where we’ve dominated and scored goals it’s been because we’ve been brave in possession, created chances and been brave in the final third. Today we didn’t do that.

‘Defensively we pressed well and were pretty solid. We defended our box well in the first half, but on the other side of it in terms of chance creation we we weren’t quite there. We didn’t threaten the Shrewsbury goal enough to say we deserved to win.’

Pompey’s energy levels and movement was glaringly missing for much of the afternoon against Steve Cotterill’s side.

Mousinho acknowledged that, but felt things improved for his side after the break.

He added: ‘It (the lack of energy) was one of my points at half-time, we didn’t show enough urgency in the first half.

‘In the second we tried to increase the tempo of the game. Unfortunately we got caught on the counter when we gave the ball away - and it was an excellent goal from Shrewsbury.

‘We did try to inject some more energy into the game in the second half. They dropped off after the goal and we decided that was our time to play - we have to do that from the start.’