Portsmouth's Championship Challenge: Balancing Squad Fitness and Performance

The Championship is supposed to grind you down. Managers talk about the “relentless” schedule almost by reflex.

Portsmouth haven’t really had that. Not yet.

A bizarre postponement against Wolves has left Pompey with just one midweek fixture so far. Now comes an even stranger stretch: three weeks without a league game, and only a handful of players likely to disappear on international duty.

On paper, that sounds ideal. In reality, it underlines how much plate-spinning John Mousinho has already been doing.

A squad used, but not yet hardened

Portsmouth have used 28 players in the league already. That’s a huge number for this stage of the season. Only three of them have started every Championship game. Only seven have managed to complete 90 minutes more than once.

That tells its own story.

Some of it is by design. Mousinho has better options than in previous years and has never been shy about leaning into the five-substitute rule. He likes energy, he likes impact from the bench, and he’s picked teams with that in mind.

But a lot of it has been necessity.

Several players arrived short of peak fitness. Marko Milovanovic, Jayden Meghoma and Tyrese Shade all needed to play catch-up after limited training time around their moves. Shade and Milovanovic barely had a proper rhythm before they were pitched into a new club. Milovanovic has since picked up a minor injury.

Abu Kamara was eased in carefully. Ryan Kavuma-McQueen is just 17 and, sensibly, his minutes are being managed – not least because he’s been playing with a broken hand.

This is not a settled, battle-hardened Championship squad yet. It’s a group being built on the move.

A winger crisis and lingering knocks

Injuries always come. Every club can point to a list. Portsmouth’s, though, has hit key areas at awkward times.

Three wingers – Josh Murphy, Keshi Anderson and now Luke Brooke-Smith – have all gone down. That’s a whole flank of the squad suddenly stripped away.

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

Conor Shaughnessy’s situation sums it up. He looked somewhere close to his best last weekend, a reminder of how important he can be. Yet he sat out the only midweek game so far, and Mousinho is still unwilling to commit to him playing more than once a week. The last two seasons have already been chewed up by injuries; no one at the club wants to gamble with a third.

None of this is unique to Portsmouth. But it does explain why so few players are getting through full matches. By the end of September, Mousinho will be hoping that most of those available are capable of lasting 90 minutes, and doing it regularly.

Right now, it still feels like he’s keeping too many fragile pieces in the air.

The break before the storm

You’d think three weeks off would be a gift. Mousinho doesn’t see it that way.

For a team still searching for rhythm and full-match fitness, such a long pause can stall momentum and sharpen the difficulty of what comes next. And what comes next is brutal.

The South Coast derby is the starting gun for a punishing run: five matches in 14 days, eight in 28. No gentle easing back in. No hiding places. Just a series of hard, high-stakes fixtures crashing into each other.

That’s when the earlier plate-spinning turns into something far more demanding.

Mousinho will need more players capable of going the distance, not just impacting games in short bursts. The bench depth that has helped him so far will be tested in a very different way when recovery time shrinks and the intensity spikes.

The Championship will finally become what everyone says it is. The question now is whether Portsmouth’s patched-up, carefully managed squad is ready to live with that reality, week after relentless week.