Pompey ask to start
Pompey will request to start the 2022-23 season away from Fratton Park.
Blues chief executive, Andy Cullen, has confirmed the club will speak to the EFL in an effort to ensure the opening game of the campaign is on the road.
That’s in the face of the ongoing £11.5m redevelopment of their home this summer.
Work is continuing on the South Stand and lower North Stand, with all the seats now ripped out of the South Stand and Archibald Leitch truss exposed.
Pompey are planning to host a pre-season friendly at Fratton Park ahead of the new campaign as a test event.
The purpose of that is to gain the safety certificate required for the South Stand, ahead of the season starting on July 30.
Unlike previous seasons, there will be no Carabou Cup fixture the following Tuesday with that game taking place the following week.
That provides Pompey with some certainty that having the opening game away from home will guarantee time to fine-tune any issues arising from the test event.
Cullen said: ‘We will request that (the first game be away from Fratton Park), I can confirm that.
‘The first game is July 30, but unlike past seasons there is no game the following Tuesday.
‘The Caribou Cup is the week after so you go Saturday-Saturday-Tuesday.
‘So if we do a friendly a week before the season starts, it will give us a twoweek opportunity to satisfy anything else we need to do.
‘It just makes sense to do it that way,
‘There’s no guarantee the league will give us that, but generally they are sympathetic when it comes to building works they are as sympathetic as they can be.’
Pompey started the 2021/22 EFL season away from home, Lee Brown scoring a second half winner at Fleetwood.
The previous campaign, 2020/21, Pompey also kept a first-day clean sheet - in a 0-0 Fratton Park stalemate with Shrewsbury.
Pompey had also played the Shrews on the opening day in 2019/20,
Ryan Giles bagging a 68th minute winner for the hosts. The visitors had Ross McCrorie sent off late on.