Pompey play up, but Guy stays calm

GUY Whittingham insists his Portsmouth side won’t get carried away after swatting Morecambe aside to claim their first win of the season.

Pompey cruised towards victory after strikes from Jed Wallace, David Connolly and Patrick Agyemang wrapped up the game before half-time.

But Whittingham admitted there was no room for complacency after the south coast side failed to improve on their first-half goals tally.

“It is not as euphoric as you might think, because we wanted to get another goal,” he said.

“There is a relief there because you want to start winning as soon as you can and it was good to keep a clean sheet.

“This is our first win, but that gives us no right to go to Mansfield and win.”

While Whittingham was hardly jumping for joy, it was certainly a much more joyous affair than the 4-1 opening day drubbing by Oxford, in what proved to be a brutal re-introduction to the Football League’s basement tier.

Wallace gave the hosts the lead in the 20th minute after Agyemang found the winger with a perfectly-timed pass which he duly dispatched past replacement keeper Andreas Arestidou.

Arestidou took the place of Barry Roche, who was taken ill before the game - and he had his hands full for much of the first half.

The keeper had to pick the ball out of the net again six minutes later, as a driving run by Wallace found Connolly in space, and after a Shrimps clearance gave the ball straight back to the veteran, he coolly finished.

Things quickly got worse for Morecambe when Andrew Wright was given a second yellow card after another late challenge, this time on Barcham.

Pompey wrapped up the points three minutes later, when Agyemang latched onto another through ball by Connolly and saw his shot ricochet off the far post and into the net.

It meant a miserable long journey back to Lancashire for the 113 Shrimps fans and manager Jim Bentley blamed a lack of discipline. “We’ve given them a leg up with the sending off and he should know better than that,” said Bentley.“But the second goal was the killer; they were four on one with us from our corner. It’s all about those little things, but we’ll learn from it.”

But the Morecambe boss believes his side came across one of the league’s strongest teams.

“Credit to the lads in the second half, we could have even got a goal ourselves, but Portsmouth are one of the favourites this season.”