Portsmouth boss: Refusal to do transfer business has left us with an overinflated squad - thankfully

John Mousinho is adamant Pompey’s decision to assemble an ‘overinflated’ squad has been vindicated.

And he's confident the Blues possess enough strength in depth to cope with the fresh set-back of losing Joe Morrell, Tom McIntyre and Terry Devlin for the season.

Pompey are reeling after the trio joined Regan Poole, Alex Robertson and Josh Dockerill in being sidelined for the remainder of their Championship push during a wretched campaign for injury.

Nonetheless, with a squad of 31 senior players overall, Mousinho believes they are well-placed to absorb such absences over the final 15 matches.

In addition to five new arrivals in the January window, the Blues rejected enquiries for their players in the interests of maintaining healthy numbers.

And with 22 players still available for Carlisle on Saturday, it’s a club decision which has, ultimately, proven correct. 

Mousinho told The News: ‘I’m sure you can imagine that when players aren't featuring in sides or squads we get a huge amount of enquiries and our answer was really simple - we don’t want to shift anyone out in January.

‘There was nothing concrete, just enquiries. The only player we were looking to move on was Denver. We didn’t want to actually lose any players.

‘I think it’s natural when players aren’t involved in starting line-ups and are not in squads, there are always enquiries, there were loads of those, nothing specific, no bids are anything like that.

‘Polite enquiries to which we said: “No, we want these players in the building because we think they can contribute”.

‘It’s why we decided to go with the numbers that we went with in August, making sure we were strong enough to get through to January.

‘We brought players in and when you bring in five and don’t get rid of any, sometimes the squad can be a bit overinflated, but, at the minute, we're still looking at a really healthy squad.

‘If the worst comes to the worst for Pompey and we have an overinflated squad towards the back end of the season, then I’ll have seven or eight difficult conversations ahead of every game.

‘I would rather deal with that than being short for matches.’

Of the existing squad, Zak Swanson, Tino Anjorin and Ben Stevenson continue their comebacks from injury.

And Mousinho insists owners Tornante never applied any pressure to let players depart in a bid to drive down the wage bill.

He added: ‘It got to the point in January where we were looking at who we wanted to bring in and had a conversation with the board, as we did every 2-3 days.

‘We identified the targets and the emphatic response was “Go get it done”. That was brilliant to hear - never a sniff about having to move anyone out, never a sniff about needing to free up any wages elsewhere.

‘We had signalled to the board we thought the right thing to do was to try to keep the squad together and they listened.

‘We knew there would be interest and, when an agent or football club called, we politely declined.’