Portsmouth's Stuttering Start in the Championship

The Championship never lets up. Everyone inside it says the same. Yet, oddly, Portsmouth haven’t really felt the full force of that grind. Not yet.

A postponed trip to Wolves stripped out one of the early midweeks. So far, they’ve only had a single league game under the lights. Now comes something just as awkward in its own way: three weeks without a league fixture, with only a handful of players heading off on international duty.

For a division built on rhythm and relentlessness, this has been a stuttering start.

A squad used, but not yet fully ready

John Mousinho has already turned to 28 different players this season. That’s a huge number this early. Only three of them have started every league game. Just seven have gone beyond 90 minutes more than once in the Championship.

That tells its own story.

Some of it is by design. Mousinho likes to use his bench, likes to squeeze every drop out of the five-sub rule, and this is the deepest, most flexible squad Pompey have had in years. But the rotation isn’t just tactical. It’s medical.

Too many players have been coming in short of full fitness, or managing knocks, or playing catch-up.

New arrivals Marko Milovanovic, Jayden Meghoma and Tyrese Shade all needed conditioning work when they walked through the door. Shade and Milovanovic barely trained with their previous clubs as their moves loomed, and Milovanovic has since picked up a minor injury. Abu Kamara was eased in gently as well, his minutes carefully rationed at the start.

Then there’s Ryan Kavuma-McQueen. Seventeen years old, highly rated, and already trusted. But he’s still a teenager, and he’s doing this with a broken hand. Of course his minutes are being managed.

Wingers wiped out, leaders patched up

Injuries are part of the game. Every manager in the Championship can reel off a list. Yet for three wingers to go down in quick succession – Josh Murphy, Keshi Anderson and now Luke Brooke-Smith – is a brutal twist in one specific area of the pitch.

Elsewhere, the problems have been more staggered but just as disruptive.

Marlon Pack missed the start of the campaign. Regan Poole has wrestled with a hamstring issue. Zak Swanson and Ebou Adams both carried problems from the end of last season into the summer, dragging their recovery into this one.

Conor Shaughnessy offered a reminder of his quality last weekend, somewhere close to his best again. But even he missed the only midweek game so far, and Mousinho has been deliberately vague about whether the defender can handle playing more than once a week. The last two seasons have already been scarred by injuries; no one wants to push him back to square one.

These are not freak circumstances unique to Portsmouth. Every Championship squad is juggling something. Yet by late September, you’d expect the bulk of a group to be ready to get through 90 minutes without a second thought. Pompey aren’t quite there.

So Mousinho has been spinning plates. Constantly. The difference this year is that when one plate wobbles, there’s usually someone decent ready to step in. Squad depth softens the blow, but it doesn’t remove the strain.

An awkward break before the storm

Now comes that three-week gap in the schedule. On paper, it sounds ideal for a patched-up squad. Time on the training ground. Time to heal. Time to build up those legs.

Mousinho doesn’t see it as a blessing.

He knows what’s coming after it. The restart throws Portsmouth straight into the South Coast derby, a game that never feels normal, never behaves like any other league fixture. That match kicks off a savage run: five games in 14 days, eight in 28.

No room to ease back in. No gentle reintroduction. Just straight into the red zone.

There are some heavy fixtures in that block, the kind that punish any side not fully conditioned or still chopping and changing. Mousinho will need more than cameos and 60-minute players. He’ll need a core who can go the distance, game after game, while the rest rotate around them.

Spinning plates over a leisurely September is one thing. Doing it in a derby-led sprint, with the Championship at full speed, is another entirely.

Soon enough, we’ll find out if Portsmouth’s depth – and those carefully managed minutes – have built a squad ready to endure the storm, or one still learning how to live inside it.