'We'll keep coping': Defiant Portsmouth boss after luckless Blues hit with four injuries in a week

Another week gone, another four injuries amassed - but defiant John Mousinho insists Pompey will ‘keep on coping’.

The Blues may be long-time League One leaders, yet their team has been devastated by injuries throughout the campaign, including six season-ending blows.

The latest set-back saw Conor Ogilvie (knee), Anthony Scully (ankle), Jack Sparkes (ankle) and Callum Lang (ankle) ruled out of action last week.

Of those, only Sparkes is expected to return against Peterborough on Saturday following stitches in ankle injury sustained at Blackpool.

Nonetheless, it continues to be a challenging team selection process for the Blues’ head coach.

Mousinho told The News: ‘Everybody knows it has been a bit of bad luck and things will change. That’s bad luck as in unable to do anything about them, if that makes sense.

‘There have been a lot of season-enders, I have never known anything like it in my time in football.

‘We always look at the type of injuries we pick up. Soft tissue injuries are more of a concern, you need to assess training loads and how we have managed minutes.

‘We will always stick by the fact we were happy with building up Tino (Anjorin) to a really good place by the time of Chesterfield. Then he came off before half-time, so it wasn’t any accumulation of fatigue, it was really bad luck.

‘Sometimes we ask whether we could have managed Alex Robertson any differently, but we keep playing it back in our minds about him not having many minutes over Christmas and hardly training at all (in that period).

‘Tom Lowery is another, but again we thought he was in such a good position going into Cambridge. We had taken him out of games in the build-up and thought we’d managed him really well.

‘Those are the ones we look into a bit more depth. In a match, when there’s a challenge on a player or there’s no-one near him, that’s bad luck. There's nothing you can do about those.

‘The two at Blackpool were just two challenges. The one on Callum was a poor challenge, whereas I don’t think Jordan Gabriel’s challenge was poor at all, he went cleanly for the ball and just caught Jack with his studs.

‘It’s just one of those things, the amount of bad luck we've had this year has piled up, but thankfully we’ve been able to cope - so that’s what we need to do for the last eight games. We’ll keep on coping.’

Ogilvie’s knee injury against Oxford United is expected to keep him out for another three weeks, potentially five more games.

Scully sustained an ankle knock in training, yet it’s regarded as a minor knock and he’s pencilled in to return in the middle of next week.

As for Lang, Mousinho admitted on Wednesday that the Blues are ‘slightly less optimistic’ of his return for Peterborough.

He added: ‘The vast majority of these injuries have happened in matches, rather than training.

‘We train hard, we train with intensity and sometimes you leave yourself exposed to picking up injuries when you do that.

‘We don’t want lads pulling out of tackles in training. but most have occurred in matches.’