Soccer
John Mousinho insists there is plenty of room for improvement for Portsmouth
Portsmouth boss John Mousinho admitted his side had plenty of room for improvement after beating Cardiff 2-0 to pick up their first home win of the season.
Goals from Conor Shaughnessy and Serbian striker Marezi helped Pompey make amends for Tuesday’s defeat at home to Derby and an opening weekend loss at the hands of QPR.
Mousinho said: “I’m delighted with the result.
“It was completely different to the other performances, we didn’t necessarily have a huge amount of control in the game, but I thought the first half was pretty good.
“The second half became a bit fractured, Cardiff changed their shape, which caused us a couple of problems.
“Thankfully for us, after we got the second goal, the game broke up a bit as there were quite a few stoppages which probably helped us just to kill the game off.
“You can’t be perfect in everything that we do, we strive for that so there are going to be opportunities.
“We have been down in the dumps because of the results, the performances haven’t been a million miles off it and there’s loads we want to do better, I never ever want to hide behind that.
“We have to make sure we are level when we win games and level when we lose games – and just look for areas to improve because that’s going to make us better.”
Pompey paid a poignant pre-match tribute to former goalkeeper Alan Knight, who sadly passed away this week aged 65.
The home side broke the deadlock 14 minutes before half time when Shaughnessy sent a looping header into the net from new boy Tyrese Shade’s long throw.
It was 2-0 seven minutes into the second half when Adrian Segecic picked out Marezi with a pin-point cross and the big striker swept the ball past the helpless Nathan Trott.
Cardiff are still waiting for their first Championship win since last season’s promotion from League One.
Bluebirds boss Brian Barry-Murphy said: “It was obviously a very disappointing result.
“We are not happy with the goals we conceded and there are a lot of areas where we can improve.
“We had enough chances to score but were not clinical enough.
“We were not aggressive enough defensively and we always knew it was going to be a very tough test.
“We are confident we can win games at this level, as long as we get the basics right.”
