Michael Pantling mener Pompey trenger to-tre erfarne spillere inn i januarvinduet.

MENINGER: Vår medlem nummer 39, Michael Pantling, er bosatt i Danmark, men pleier å reise over til England for å se Pompey flere ganger i sesongen enn noen andre av våre medlemmer.

Han deler jevnlig sine tanker og meninger om Pompey med oss. Denne gangen ser Michael på tingenes tilstand etter rundt halvspilt sesong.

LES OGSÅ: Tabellen lyger ikke

Happily Still Top

That was quite a frustrating Christmas/New Year period which thankfully ended with a win against Stevenage. We are still top but Bolton have a game in hand.

Pompey didn’t look particularly good at Exeter and our opponents came very close to scoring, hitting a post, the match could have gone either way and we certainly didn’t dominate against a team towards the bottom of the table.

I’m hoping that Pompey will come through this shaky patch and return to the quality we saw during the autumn. This is our best placing in very many years and our owners resolve needs to be tested in the transfer market
in order to ensure we remain in an automatic promotion position.

I would like to see two or three new players with proven experience brought in to reinforce the squad not just to get us over the line but also to help us stay up following promotion. It is clear to see how big a gap in quality there is between League 1 and the Championship, with only Ipswich doing (exceptionally) well out of the sides promoted last season. Plymouth are just about coping and Sheffield Wednesday are already in trouble in the relegation zone.

Pompey are perhaps over-reliant on Bishop, it was good that he scored against Stevenage and 13 so far goals this season isn’t bad but he needs to get well over 20 this season and we need one or two others to get over 10 goals each – Paddy Lane seems the most likely.

I think we are still reasonably solid at the back. I have been impressed with Joe Rafferty and Pompey should be grateful that Sean Raggett didn’t leave in the summer transfer despite being seemingly out of favour

Hopefully some of the injured defenders will return to increase the competition and further strengthen the defence. It hasn’t worked for Denver Hulme and Pompey should try to sell him before his contract runs out in the summer.

Marlon Pack’s presence holds the midfield together and Robertson is clearly very talented and thankfully for Pompey it doesn’t look like he is in the Australia squad for the Asian cup. Joe Morrel is also talented but gets far too many yellow cards, often for very avoidable reasons – we need to have our best players available and not suspended.

All in all, we have still got the best Pompey squad that we have had in years but have a bit of a dilemma with getting playing experience for a number of the younger squad members as we need all of our very best players on the pitch – the recent period has shown that there are no “easy” matches where they could be given more of a chance.

We will be in for an exciting second half of the season.

Godt nytår and Play Up Pompey!

Colby Bishop.