Portsmouth boss' honest admission about Kusini Yengi's contract situation as frustration continues
John Mousinho insists Kusini Yengi’s contract situation is ‘not on my radar’.
Instead the head coach is putting his energies into focusing on keeping Pompey in the Championship with eight matches remaining.
The Blues will be without Yengi against Blackburn on Saturday after the 26-year-old suffered a hamstring issue while training with Australia.
It’s the latest set-back for the striker, who has featured just 11 times this season, including Pompey’s last Championship match at Preston.
Yengi’s contract expires in the summer, although the club hold a 12-month option - but Mousinho is adamant the ongoing situation is not on his agenda.
He told The News: ‘Whenever players get injured, we try to figure out how we can get them available for the most amount of minutes possible - and I’m sure Kas would have liked to have been available a bit more this season.
‘Some of them are just bad luck, this one is minor, so it’s not a huge concern, but we certainly want players to be available for as many minutes as possible.
‘To be honest, his contract isn’t anything we are really thinking about at the moment. Any individual’s contract talks are so far away from my personal radar.
‘It might be on the club’s radar, but it’s so far away from what I’m thinking about. I am focused on the next eight games - and very, very focused on Blackburn.
‘I don’t think about players’ performances in line with trying to earn new contracts, I just think about players’ performances in isolation and what they need to get into the side and what they need to affect the team.
‘At the minute there’s no point really having a conversation about what Kas needs to do because he’s out injured, but certainly he has a huge amount of ability and a huge amount of physical ability.
‘He probably needs to get a consistent run of games, that is the first port of call, which he hasn’t had this season.
‘There was injury at the start of the season, then, when he got himself fit, he started three games which led into the international break - and he got injured in that international break. Then, when he’s had the opportunity to come back into the side, he’s picked up the current injury again.
‘We rate him, that’s why we started him in those games and why he started against Preston. We think he would be good enough to affect the level, otherwise we wouldn’t have bothered.’
‘No player gets injured deliberately’
Yengi has now been sidelined for four different spells through injury following promotion to the Championship.
His latest set-back occurred during training while on international duty with Australia, ahead of World Cup qualifiers with Indonesia and China.
Mousinho added: ‘Players want to play, no player gets injured deliberately, so it’s always a tough spot to be in.
‘You don’t get too frustrated with these things because they are what they are. You can sit there and get frustrated about injuries, but, if we did that, we’d spend 100 per cent of the time being frustrated because of the amount of injuries we’ve had.
‘It’s one of those things, we have to deal with it, move on and make sure that the players coming in underneath Kusini are available to step up to the mark.’
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