‘The reason…’: Why Portsmouth boss believes Sunderland arrival can fill star man’s boots after injury blow
Adil Aouchiche is ready to fill Callum Lang’s boots and continue Pompey’s high-tempo charge towards Championship safety.
John Mousinho is adamant the Sunderland man is in a place to pick up the baton from Lang when it comes to being his side’s energiser, after news of his season-ending injury emerged.
Aouchiche will be hot favourite to replace the Scouser against QPR this weekend, in what will be his first start since arriving on loan from the Stadium of Light.
The Frenchman will bring a different set of attributes to the table to Lang, but Mousinho is confident he now has an understanding of what’s required when it comes to being part of Pompey’s high-pressing game.
He said: ‘The reason we brought him to the club was to play games. There’s no doubting Adil’s ability, he’s had a good period of adjustment to see how we want our team to play and our 10s to play and if he plays at the weekend he’s had a really good period.
‘We’ve got other options as well and we’ve spoken about other options, so there’s plenty of competition for that spot.
‘When we brought in Adil we didn’t want to bring in a Callum Mk2. We want to have options and different styles of players.
‘So they are different, very different, and we’ve seen that first hand with the games Adil has played for Portsmouth - and against Portsmouth for Sunderland. They are definitely different players.’
Aouchiche is being billed as a player who can unlock Championship defences with craft, compared to the incessant running of Lang which many rivals struggled to contain. Mousinho doesn’t disagree with the 22-year-old being viewed in such a fashion, but underlined the data shows he doesn’t ignore what’s required in terms of covering the hard yards.
‘Right up there’
He added: ‘If you look at Adil’s data through the season for the Championship, he’s right up there. He’s right up there for distances covered.
‘We had that data going into the Sunderland game (in December) and he was outstanding in terms of projected distances, distances covered, high speed and sprint distances. So that confirmed to me if he was to become available we definitely had to take him, because you get all of the attributes on the ball with Adil - but he does the job off the ball as well.
‘We get the data straight after the game pretty much. We have our own data, but there’s a system called Second Spectrum which gives you more of the live data, plus what’s happened after the game for every team.
‘Adil’s at Oxford, in terms of projected, was the highest for metres per minute, highest for sprint distance per minute and highest for high-speed per minute. He had the advantage of coming on, but he was by far the highest for those.’