April 16, 2024: A date to add to those that will live forever
Sometimes I think about something I want to write about, get straight to it and end up rambling on for about 2,000 words. But this is different. I want to write 2,000 words about the League One champions and don’t know where or how to start.
I could start in 1983 and the last time Pompey won the third division, when Steve Aizlewood was the
80s version of Sean Raggett and when Alan Biley did the Conor-shaughnessyheading-in-the-clinchinggoal bit.
I could start in 2012 and the day my son, then nine, and I watched us lose to Derby (yes, ironic that) to drop out of the top half of ‘The 92’. Or I could start on New Year’s Day 2023, when the seeds of this amazing season we have just witnessed were sewn.
But I’ll start at the end. The End, with capital letters and everything. April 16, 2024. A date that joins, among others, May 7, 1983; April 15 and 26, 2003 (the first of those two, by the way, was also the date Alex Robertson was born); May
17, 2008; November 27, 2008; May 6, 2017 and March 31, 2019, in the growing list of Pompey days that will live forever in the memory of all who were there.
I’ve stuck there to the ones denoting occasions I was actually at. Other fans will add May 3, 1980, April
17, 2017 and a few others if they’re doing their own lists – older readers might add those 1939, 1949 and 1949 dates we all know about too.
But at least a shade under 20,000 of us can now reflect on a new date that will never be forgotten. Another that we’ll talk about when we’re 70 or 80, remembering the detail and the feelings it sparked as if it were yesterday, which, as I write this now, it still is.
For much of Tuesday evening, it didn’t feel like we were close to promotion, even though, elsewhere, Bolton were never winning. The as-it-stands table had a (P) next to our name from start to finish, although only when Shaughnessy went up and threaded another of his corner headers through the eye of a relative needle did a (C) appear next to it.
It would have been
‘typical Pompey’ – at least to those of us who remember so many near misses, agonies and heartbreaks going back to the 80s and 90s, and further back than that for some – to have lost and been promoted. It would also have been ‘typical Pompey’ to have lost, heard of a late Bolton winner and had to steel ourselves for Saturday and do it all again.
But John Mousinho’s Pompey are not ‘typical Pompey’ – at least they’re not most of the time. They are still prone to making us sweat, which has been true of just about every Blues line-up we’ve ever set eyes upon, but generally speaking they don’t have half the traits that many of their forerunners have had. They don’t shoot themselves in the foot nearly as often as their predecessors.
The 23-24 season has been played out without too many alarms, blips or crises. The fact we’ve clinched top spot with two games to go tells you that. Since very early in the season, we as fans have turned up to games or followed them from afar being able to feel fairly confident of success. A most unnatural outlook for us, you must admit.
Even at home – where Pompey have failed to keep a clean sheet since the visit of Bolton, that team selfproclaimed by some of their fans as the best in the league – conceding goals has not felt like the disaster and the bar to success it sometimes did under Danny Cowley or Kenny Jackett.
Let one in? Never mind, we’ll equalise at some point. Late-ish equaliser? Still time for another. Someone will pop up from a late, late corner. And that is exactly what happened against the
Tykes, whose first goal was swiftly cancelled out by a thunderous Kusini Yengi finish and whose second was wiped out by a combination of Mousinho’s latest masterstroke substitutions, as Christian Saydee won the penalty that Colby Bishop tucked away.
That was enough for most of us, wasn’t it? A draw rather than a defeat, our own point clinching promotion rather than someone else’s loss, the latest three-month unbeaten run (our second of those in one season – some kind of record?) intact.
But it wasn’t enough for Marlon Pack, nor for Shaughnessy. One last late corner, one last thumping header, one last home win to get us over the promotion line – not limping over it but marching over it, just as we’ve marched at the front of the League One parade for the past seven months.
The scenes that followed were incredible. Thankfully the premature pitch invasion by a few over-excited types immediately after the winning goal was nipped in the bud so that the game could finish and the blue masses could engulf the green, could surround and hug their heroes and could wait to salute them in front of the South Stand.
Shout out to whoever put out the ‘please don’t invade the pitch’ warnings, we know you had to, but you knew we had to ignore them. Nothing wrong with any of that.
And so we come to the final two games able to relax.
Or do we? I am sure I am not alone in now wanting us to reach the 100-point barrier, which we can do with wins over Wigan and Lincoln.
One hundred points! I know others have done it, and I know that 21 seasons ago, Pompey totalled 98. But
100. It’s a cricket score. It’s 2.38 points per game, for goodness sake.
I don’t begrudge the lads their allnight party in Albert Road, and whatever else they quite justifiably got up to on Tuesday night and in the small hours of Wednesday, but I hope they’re back at it against the Latics. And against Lincoln, when I fully expect us to play our part in stopping the Imps in their tracks and helping Oxford into the play-offs – not because I particularly want Oxford to get into or win the play-offs, I just think they will. If we’re going up, they’re bound to join us. They’re just always there, aren’t they?
So – plenty to play for this Satuday and my matchday superstitions (which include the clothes I will be wearing, the angle from which I will be taking a picture of the Jimmy Dickinson statue, and the times at which I will feel the need to consume the blocks of my Yorkie bought for me by my friend John from the North Lower (west end) food kiosk, that’s after the two chunks ‘held over’ from Tuesday night’s Yorkie – in case they have sold out of them on Saturday – have gone) will remain solidly in place.
But, whatever happens now, we will be playing in the
John Mousinho’s Pompey are not ‘typical Pompey’ – at least they’re not most of the time
Canon League Division 2 (is it still called that?) in August.
We’ll be off to Blackburn, Preston, Millwall, Sunderland, Watford, maybe QPR, maybe Leeds, maybe Leicester, probably Sheffield United. Is now a good time to point out we last won at Bramall Lane in 1955 despite having played there 25 times since? Okay, I’ll gloss over that. And they’ll all be coming to us too. And maybe we’ll play Everton or Nottingham Forest under the Fratton lights. And with luck we’ll have a grand Saturday lunchtime jaunt up the M27 to face that lot up the road and see if a 2020s version of David Norris emerges from the ranks.
The 2024-25 season will be my 44th watching Pompey and rather neatly it will be the 22nd of those spent in the second division. I – and many, many other Pompey fans, I am sure – have always thought of that division as our natural home. The top flight is very nice now and then; the third tier has had its moments but (and we can say this now) does feel a bit too full of ‘small teams’ to be agoodfitfor us, and the fourth tier, well, let’s just say four years in that was enough and more, thank you very much. I still shudder at the thought of the 1-0 loss at home to York. York!
I can’t wait for the Championship (yes, I’ve now been brought up to date and informed that Canon have recently and sadly brought their sponsorship deal to an end) and I think we’ll do okay. Yes it’s a big step up but we’ve not just bumbled our way to the League One title. We’ve done it with a bit to spare and we’ve done it with a squad massively hit by long-term injuries to key players. When you add the treatment room troops – like Regan Poole, Tom Mcintyre and Joe Morrell –tothe players that have carried us through these past few months, it is an impressive squad. It has competition in almost all departments – and that’s before the inevitable summer outs and ins have begun. There will be players leaving – including, quite possibly, one or two who have done a lot to get us to the top of L1 and who fans will be sorry to see depart – and there will certainly be players arriving.
Richard Hughes and co will have been plotting for the Championship for most of this season, maybe even longer. They will know in some cases the names and contract situations of particular players they want, and they will know, beyond that, what type of players they want and how much money they will have at their disposal to go and get them.
This ‘hidden’ side of the club – the recruitment and longer-term planning – has sharpened up massively in the past year or two and is a huge reason why 2023-24 has been such a success. The pressure on those people to maintain their great work is huge but we must have faith that they will continue to have many more successes than failures in who they bring in.
And that brings me to our manager. I remember a number of local journos all tweeting the same thing at the same time on January 19, 2023, saying they understood that ‘John Mousinho is under serious consideration to become the next head coach of Portsmouth… chairman of the PFA… still under contract as a player with Oxford United’. There were too many of them saying the same thing for there to be nothing in it, and sure enough 24 hours later, here he was.
I like to think I was in the ‘let’s give him a chance’ camp. I was curious and, yes, a bit sceptical. Did the owners and bosses know what they were doing here? Was it a gamble? It felt like it, but it didn’t take long for Mousinho to get the majority of fans onside and believing he could do something for us, with a passing aeroplane perhaps convincing a few to give him time rather than taking the opposite view.
The remainder of 22-23 was decent, but contained too many draws for us to have a serious bid to get into the play-offs. It was our sixth season of falling short, and was the third in a row in which we had not even got to the play-offs. Not good enough, but Mousinho, Jon Harley and their staff had done enough in less than half a season to suggest 2324 might bring brighter fortunes. And the summer’s arrivals on the playing staff strengthened that feeling.
I mentioned New Year’s Day 2023 earlier and this is where I return to it. It was the day Cowley’s Pompey hosted Charlton – three days after almost toppling highflying Ipswich at Fratton. If Charlton had been beaten, fans might have been tempted to think a wretched last couple of months of
2022 were behind us and a promotion bid could be within our capabilities.
But Charlton romped to a 3-1 win, Fratton Park was seething, as much as bricks and mortar themselves can seethe, and a day later the brothers were on the way, 22 months after Jackett had departed amid a similarly heavy air of discontentment among wearied, worn-down, success-hungry supporters.
When we look back on our seven years in League One, it’s impossible not to conclude, if you want to put it in simple terms, that Mousinho has succeeded where Jackett and Cowley failed. That’s what this latest chapter of the Pompey story will say in years to come and it won’t be wrong.
But I do think it’s too simplistic to say those previous two bosses simply failed. Jackett put a good team together in his first couple of years – remember when Pitman, Curtis, Lowe and Evans were our front four? – and had he been bolder and maybe less stubborn in his ways, he might well have got us up. Cowley didn’t get us into the play-offs but did bring in some players who have been key to the title win – Joe Rafferty, Connor Ogilvie, Pack, Morrell, Bishop – and some will say that if he’d had the recruitment support that Mousinho has had, he might have done better. We’ll never know, of course.
What you can’t argue with is that the appointment of Mousinho has been an absolute masterstroke and we have at the helm a manager who can take us further and will probably, in time, go to much higher levels himself – with or without us.
We’ve had plenty of managers who ‘get’ Pompey, we’ve had plenty who know how to win games of football – but have we ever had one who gets Pompey, knows how to win games and comes across so impressively and in such a cool and collected manner as Mousinho does, both in interviews and to anyone who meets him personally? You’d think he’d been in management for 20 years the way he goes about the job.
It’s his air of authority, his willingness to do things his way and take the odd gamble, and his record so far, a record which far outdoes that of just about everyone else who’s ever occupied our manager’s office, that gives me great hope for our Championship campaign.
It’s too simplistic to say Kenny Jackett and Danny Cowley simply failed