'You can't' - Rival boss makes frank Leeds United assessment amid team 'wake up call'

Portsmouth boss John Mousinho has fired a Leeds United warning to his Pompey side after a “ridiculously poor” pre-season friendly display and team “wake up call”.

Pompey are back in the Championship following last season’s promotion as League One champions and Mousinho’s side will provide the opening weekend opposition for Leeds in a Saturday lunchtime kick-off at Elland Road.

Mousinho, though, saw his side fall to a 4-0 defeat in Saturday’s behind-closed-doors friendly against League One side Wycombe Wanderers, after which he delivered a frank assessment of the upcoming trip to Elland Road.

Speaking to the The News, Mousinho slammed the performance as “ridiculously poor” and admitted his side cannot ‘turn it on and off’ and expect anything at Leeds.

"It was a good exercise from the fitness standpoint, the players have some decent minutes in their legs,” said the Pompey boss.

"Apart from that, there aren’t too many positives to take, other than it’s a fantastic time to lose a game like that with a couple of weeks to go until the start of the season. Away from the result, the performance is the big thing for us, we really weren’t at it and it’s a wake-up call for us going into the season. I thought both of our teams were really poor.

"It’s amazing, honestly it’s a brilliant result for us at this stage of the season. We had performed so well up until this point in training and in pre-season games, then, when the level stepped up, the way the boys handled the ball, the way we pressed, everything wasn’t up to scratch.

‘It’s a really good time for that to happen rather than us maybe get a way through the next week and then everything is ready to go into the Leeds game.

"We all talk about pre-season friendlies and how it doesn’t mean anything. They don’t mean anything in terms of results, but performance definitely does. You can’t turn it on and off and then go to Elland Road and get anything from it.

"There’s a lot of learning points. The staff can dissect it and go “Here are the reasons why we didn’t get what we needed to get out of that in terms of the performance”.

"If we’d have lost 4-0 and performed well I wouldn’t have cared, sometimes in these games we aren’t organised from set-plays, there are trialists here and there, so you might not think we are as cute as we need to be. But none of those things were excuses for the way we played over 120 minutes.’