Portsmouth reeling from latest injury blow as Australian's Fratton Park misery continues
The Australian has featured twice for Pompey since arriving in July 2024
Pompey are reeling from yet another injury set-back for the luckless Jacob Farrell.
Yet, encouragingly, head coach John Mousinho doesn’t believe the Australian will require an operation on his problematic groin.
Farrell, who has suffered an injury-ravaged stay on the south coast since his July 2024 arrival, made his training return at the end of last month, having been sidelined since September with the ongoing issue.
However, he has since been forced out of action once more, ensuring the 22-year-old couldn’t be considered for Saturday’s trip to Birmingham in the absence of Connor Ogilvie.
With Ogilvie going down ill on the eve of the St Andrew’s clash, Mousinho instead turned to left-footed centre-half Ibane Bowat to stand in at left-back, representing his Pompey league debut.
Now recovered, Ogilvie will return to the Blues side for Wednesday night’s encounter with Wrexham (8pm). Yet Mousinho is unable to put a timescale on when Farrell will be back following his latest injury blow.
Portsmouth boss: He’s not training with us at the moment
He told The News: ‘Jacob has been in and out of training and last week had to dip out, it’s just not settling down and that’s something we’re not sure of a timescale on.
‘Obviously it’s very frustrating from our point of view. Naturally, it looked like Birmingham would have been a game that Jacob played.
‘He does not need an operation at the minute, it’s just something we are looking to settle. Maybe injections, but not operation.
‘He’s not training with us at the moment, we are just waiting for that to settle. It’s a really frustrating one, there have been a couple of squads this year that Jacob hasn’t made as a selection, but recently it would have been very useful to have him.’
Bowat was replaced at left-back in the 56th minute by Zak Swanson in the 4-0 defeat to Birmingham, despite Swanson being a right-back.
Mousinho admits he had considered starting Jordan Williams there ahead of the former Fulham man, in the absence of Farrell and Ogilvie.
However, he elected to keep three of the back four which lined up in the 1-0 defeat to Stoke, rather than initiate two changes to his rearguard at St Andrew’s.
‘We had to change it’
Mousinho added: ‘If you look at the options we had, what we wanted to do was try to keep the planned back four intact as possible.
‘We didn’t want to change too many things around, we thought it would be a good outlet to have a left-footed player on that left-hand side.
‘I suppose there was a possibility of a shape change, but without Ogilvie and Farrell, we didn’t really have a left-wing back either. We did consider a shape change, but we thought we’d be able to do what we could with the personnel.
‘We brought on Willo against Southampton, but we didn’t want to disrupt the back too much and move too many of the starting back four in and out.
‘The reality is if we had that clean bill of health, Connor would have played there. We worked on that on Wednesday and, by the time we got to Friday, we had to change it.’
Your Next Pompey Read: 'Weight of the world on my shoulders': John Mousinho addresses Pompey pressure