Portsmouth boss pinpoints week of chaos as Blues frustratingly surrender two-goal lead in Swansea stalemate

The Blues head coach watched his team go 2-0 up against the Swans after 45 minutes, only to be grateful to head back to the south coast clutching a 2-2 draw following a tough second half.

It represented a first match in three weeks following the international break and then fixtures against Blackburn (weather) and Millwall (Fratton Park electrics) frustratingly both postponed hours before kick-off.

And Mousinho is adamant that disruption of the previous eight days critically impacted upon his side’s second-half display as desperately attempted to keep Luke Williams’ side at bay.

He told The News: ‘It was a good point. Whenever you go 2-0 up it obviously always feels like it’s going to be two points dropped. However, the nature of the game in the second half made it feel like a hard-earned point gained.

‘If I look at the context of the week we’ve had - and not having played for three weeks as well - we probably saw the freshness of Pompey in the first half. Maybe Swansea came off the back of a difficult trip to Derby on Wednesday night.

‘In the second half you saw a Swansea side who were in the groove and they’d had those games and looked match fit, versus our lads, who we haven’t been able to train or play fixtures.

‘If we’d had those three weeks knowing we were going to have that game, we could train really hard all week.

‘As it was, we’ve hardly done anything with the preparation for the game and that really showed in the second half.

‘Hopefully we’re going to get that out of our system, we’ve now got a bit more match fitness back and we can then go again.’

Matt Ritchie opened the scoring on 25 minutes, before the impressive Josh Murphy doubled the visitors’ advantage after 45 minutes.

However, Connor Ogilvie’s unfortunate own goal in first-half stoppage time would hand the hosts a lifeline - with Liam Cullen equalising on 53 minutes.

Mousinho added: The most frustrating thing was Swansea’s first goal

‘There are going to be things we’ll see when we look back at the game and we’re going to be frustrated by things that we did. There are going to be some things we will look at Swansea’s play and go okay that’s really good, there’s nothing we can do about that.

‘But it was a massive effort to deal with what the lads have had to deal with this week and the fans have been there with us. It’s quite a tough one to come here and get anything, so I’m really pleased with that.’