Why Portsmouth's training ground is out of bounds to their Academy

The Blues boss fielded a mixture of teenagers and experienced players for Tuesday night’s 1-0 defeat against West Ham under-21s in the Papa John’s Trophy.

However, the two groups have barely been around each other this season.

While Pompey’s first-team train at their Roko base, Liam Daish’s youngsters are using a number of sites, primarily the University of Portsmouth’s ground in Furze Lane.

And Jackett believes the separation is necessary in the current climate.

He said: ‘The youth team are training on a separate site.

‘It is due to covid, they are in a separate bubble and we made that decision quite early on. They needed to have different training facilities to ourselves.

‘We have to do everything we can to try to protect the first-team boys.

‘When you see clubs having to call games off, we do everything we can to not be in that situation.

‘There have been limited opportunities for them as well up to now.

‘Where you may have under-23 friendlies or called them up for first-team training, that hasn’t been the case in recent months.

‘Quite rightly we have to try to keep the two camps separate because we don’t want to risk covid.’

Under-18s coach, Daish, agrees with the restrictions, although admits the situation has been difficult for the youngsters.

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Daish added: ‘We have been a little nomadic, but we’re getting by and making the best out of it.

‘Our players don’t go into Roko, Instead we pick some of them up outside, then go to another site for them to get changed and another site to train.

‘In past seasons it has been more integrated, everyone together or players going over to the first-team to train at times. That has ceased this year because of covid.

‘It’s not always about working in a perfect environment. Without knowing it, it has probably helped in their development as well.’

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