Portsmouth boss John Mousinho previews the Carlisle United trip and reacts to news of Joe Morrell, Terry Devlin and Tom McIntyre all being ruled for the season.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 So Jon, obviously a disappointing day today, considering injuries and clarifying the situation
00:07 with three of your players. We'll start first of all with Joe Morel, what's the situation
00:10 with that one please?
00:11 Yeah, Joe Morel, good and bad news. The bad news is Joe will be out for the season, he's
00:15 actually undone a knife today, he's had a surgery on his knee. A bit of cartilage came
00:19 loose in the game against Oxford and unfortunately, yeah, after we had the scan, it's one of those
00:26 things that we need to get in and operate on, so a real bitter blow for Joe. I suppose
00:30 I'd qualify that with the fact that after we did the injury with the amount of swelling
00:33 and the amount of pain that he was in on that Tuesday evening and subsequently on the Wednesday,
00:37 we really feared the worst in terms of it being ligament damage or some serious cartilage
00:41 damage and it wasn't that. It was obviously something that he does have to have a surgical
00:47 procedure to correct but we're looking at four to five months for Joe so he should be
00:51 available for the start of pre-season. As opposed to what we thought was the worst case
00:55 scenario which was an ACL and that nine month period being out, it sort of takes him into
00:59 next year. Exactly, when you sort of mention about he said he hears something pop, you
01:03 do fear really bad then don't you? That's what we thought, certainly having come in
01:08 and spoken to him on the Wednesday, having done that myself, we really feared the worst
01:11 for Joe. So it's not ideal, the news obviously isn't great but I think there was definitely
01:15 a positive there in terms of it not being much worse. Terry Devlin? Terry, unfortunately
01:21 his shoulder injury is a bit worse than we initially feared so we sent him away for
01:24 a scan and he also requires a bit of surgery, Terry, just to repair the ligament damage
01:29 that he's got in there. Really unfortunate I think for Terry having done it in a challenge
01:34 and then just landing extremely heavily on the shoulder. Nothing obviously he could do
01:38 about it, we don't want him pulling out of challenges and not trying to win the ball
01:42 honestly. So Terry is going to be 10-12 weeks so very unlikely that we're going to see him
01:48 before the end of the season which is a blow because he was playing so well for us as well.
01:51 But he'll be fine for pre-season you feel? Yeah Terry will be fine for that. And then
01:55 Tom McIntyre as well? Yeah so Tom was the third on the injury list and I think the news
02:01 has broken anyway, unfortunately Tom has fractured his ankle and he's done it in a challenge
02:05 that he got sent off for. A really tough one I thought, at the weekend we thought we were
02:10 going to be contending with a potential three-match ban and what we were going to do with the
02:14 appeal there and now we're contending with something much more serious. And it's going
02:17 to be the season for Tom, three months, we're probably looking at 12-14 weeks at best so
02:22 that's going to take us to the end of the season by the time Tom's back. A real blow
02:26 I think for everybody involved. And another you're expecting to back start pre-season?
02:30 Yeah. The big question is how do these injuries keep happening? I mean everybody's, that's
02:37 I guess the benefit of the fact they've happened in the game, everybody's seen them. Tom and
02:42 Terry's both in the tackle and Joe with no one around him so one of those things that
02:46 sometimes those things happen. I think if we pick up a huge amount of muscular injuries,
02:51 we look at training load, we look at how much players are doing in games and what we're
02:54 following up with that within the week. But at the minute I think the injuries we've had
02:59 this week, the three injuries we've had this week over the two games, pretty much probably
03:02 sum up where a lot's been this season in terms of injuries. I'm sure every Pumpey fan watching
03:07 those would have known that there's not a huge amount we could do about those apart
03:10 from obviously no one was around Joe around the time and the other two injuries. Unless
03:16 we want players to pull out of challenges, which we definitely don't want here at Portsmouth,
03:20 then there's not much we can do.
03:22 That's five players ruled out until the end of the season now. Have you ever known anything
03:28 like it in your long career?
03:30 I've seen injury lists by luck but usually they're 11 or 12 deep with maybe eight or
03:35 nine of them returning within the next two to three weeks, maybe with minor calf tears
03:40 and muscular injuries. That's when a lot of the time I have seen in my career where you
03:44 look for answers in terms of what you're doing in training, pitches, those sort of things.
03:49 Here I've very, very rarely seen the amount of long-term injuries that we've had, mostly
03:53 through contact. We've moved away this week from those contact injuries, Marlon Pack being
04:00 a really good example where Charlie Wyke getting the red card injured Marlon, you'd think it
04:05 was nothing we could do about that. All of a sudden the luck has flipped even worse for
04:10 us because we're now injuring ourselves in challenges that result in red cards for us
04:14 as well. That in terms of what I've seen over the past week in particular is pretty unprecedented.
04:22 Is it difficult to maintain spirit about it?
04:26 Not at all to be honest. I think we hear the news and we get a bit disappointed and we
04:31 move on. That's one of the things you've got to deal with in football. There's one thing
04:36 to deal with, or I suppose two ways to deal with it. You can get dispirited and think
04:39 that's us done or we can do what we've done all season, which is when we do pick up these
04:43 injuries we can recognise how significant they are and recognise what a blow it is for
04:47 us as a squad and then get on with it. Think that's the reason we've got the players that
04:51 we've got here, we've built that squad depth, we've deliberately done that to make sure
04:55 we can cover as many positions as possible. We deliberately kept in centre-backs in January
05:00 amongst interest from other clubs because we thought there's going to be times in the
05:05 season where we're going to need it. We've done that across the board because we want
05:08 a good squad. We've been backed by the owners to bring players in, we've been backed by
05:11 the owners to keep players in as well. We're really positive about the situation despite
05:16 the fact that we know it's awful news on the three counts of those players.
05:20 It's just awful, awful bad luck isn't it?
05:23 I think that's it. Again, we will review these injuries, we'll definitely review these injuries
05:28 but sometimes when we have, I think a really good example when Tino and Alex, when they
05:34 sort of tore their hamstrings, different incidences but we looked at Tino's and thought where
05:39 was the load there in terms of Tino coming back into the game? He did it in the first
05:42 half against Chesterfield after an eight-day lay-off so we thought there's nothing really
05:47 we could have done in terms of managing the load there. Robbo's maybe slightly different
05:51 with a heavy load over the Christmas period but again, he hadn't played a huge amount
05:54 of minutes for us and those are the injuries, I'm just highlighting those because with those
05:58 sort of muscular injuries we do probably look a bit deeper into it. There's no amount of
06:03 analysis we need to do on these three injuries really because we could look at as much video
06:07 footage as we want, we know how two of them happened in challenges and Joe's was with
06:11 no-one around him.
06:12 Correct me if I'm wrong, I think Robertson's the only one that's happened in training isn't
06:15 it?
06:16 Yes, Robertson's the only one that's happened in training. I think Cassini, he took a knock
06:20 in training earlier in the season, that was when one of the players accidentally fell
06:25 on him but apart from that, everything in-game which we don't really want to hear, it's not
06:30 positive I suppose but it's much better than them occurring in training where we've got
06:33 to really think about what we're doing and all the things that we carry on our day-to-day.
06:37 In terms of the rest of the season now, how do you keep these players fit and no more
06:42 injuries?
06:43 There's nothing we can do, from my perspective we could ask the players to not run and to
06:48 not challenge and to not be fully committed to playing for Portsmouth and that's obviously
06:52 the complete opposite of what we're going to ask them to do. We want players to go into
06:55 challenges honestly, to try and win the ball, we want them to run, we want them to sprint,
06:59 we want them to be fully committed and unfortunately if we pick up injuries doing that, we'll pick
07:03 up injuries doing that but I think at some point hopefully the lack will change.
07:08 Positive this week is Cassini, Young is back and training as well.
07:11 Yes, so Cass got back in the building this week, obviously from us, selfishly it was
07:18 good that Australia were knocked out, not ideal for him because I think he was obviously
07:21 enjoying the Asia Cup and how well he'd done there. But he got some minutes over there,
07:25 he'd been training, it was a really different experience, we've managed to get through the
07:28 games without him and pick up some points which is positive for us. And I think it's
07:33 a welcome addition, it's like having a new signing back after six weeks of him being
07:37 away and he's come back, he's very fit, he's looked sharp from training and I think he's
07:40 really ready and willing to contribute for the rest of the season.
07:43 With jet lag and his workload, is he in contention with Saturday at all?
07:47 Yes, he's fine in terms of jet lag and workload. The jet lag is one thing we had to get over
07:51 but the fact that Cass played the weekend and got back in and he's had the full week
07:57 to get over it, he's a very, very good professional off the pitch anyway so there's no worries
08:01 there. He'll be available for selection at the weekend.
08:05 Any more injuries?
08:07 [Laughter]
08:09 No, apart from that we've got a clean bill of credit.
08:13 That's it, apart from those ten. How are the others getting on? Stevenson?
08:19 Yes, according to plan everything's going well. Zac's been out on the grass today, Ben's
08:24 a bit further away so we haven't seen Ben out on the grass but Ben's coming along nicely.
08:29 Zac has been out on the grass so we think within a week to ten days we'll get him re-integrated
08:35 into training which will be a nice boost to have him back. Tino came to the game at the
08:38 weekend, he's still a couple of weeks away from being re-introduced to training but again
08:43 just some positive shoots in terms of those players recovering so really nice to have
08:48 those boys back. The other thing we always monitor is the lads that have been out long
08:52 term and how they're doing in terms of Conor and Tom, they're getting through the minutes
08:55 there and they're doing really well. Apart from the blows we've had this week, it's been
09:02 positive in terms of feedback we've had, everybody else is on track. I just think apart from
09:07 the ones we've mentioned there in terms of Zac and Ben, unless I'm missing anything,
09:11 all the others are longer term ones that we probably won't see, apart from maybe Tino
09:15 but we probably won't see until next season. And of course there's a game this weekend
09:19 at Carlisle, presumably you've got an 18 man squad? Yeah, we obviously joke about the injuries
09:25 but if you look at the weekend where you saw what the 18 man squad was, we had three players
09:29 train here on Saturday morning, Anthony Scully, Gavin White and Riley Towler so we had a 21,
09:34 well 22 actually because we had Ryan Schofield here too so we had 22 players to select from.
09:40 We lost one at the weekend but we then gained Cass so we've still got plenty of players
09:43 to choose from. At some points this season it's felt like we're thin, it feels like we've
09:49 had some bitter injury blows this week but we're still not thin in terms of where we
09:53 are as a squad and how we're progressing there so what we're looking at at the weekend is
09:58 still leaving decent pros out of the squad. And you're still top of the league? Yeah exactly,
10:04 one of the things that we've tried to make sure we deal with through the season is the
10:07 fact that there's always going to be a bit of adversity, whether that's injuries, refereeing
10:11 decisions, drops in form, all of these sort of things that can happen, bits of bad luck
10:15 in games, we've got to make sure we get on with it and deal with it. There's no point
10:19 in saying we're ecstatic about all the injuries but at the same time there's nothing we can
10:22 do about it, we're going to get on with it, we're going to make sure we don't ruin it,
10:26 it doesn't affect the performance at the weekend and for the rest of the season. We've got
10:29 15 big games to finish the season and we're still in a really strong position.