Simon Bassey says Pompey will get nowhere if they keep conceding 'stupid' goals.

After another 90 minutes that had fans wondering when their horrendous run of form will turn, as Bolton ran out 3-0 winners, the caretaker boss was blunt in his appraisal of the team's efforts.

The loss left Pompey 15th in the table and now closer to the bottom four than to the play-off places.

Bassey told the club website: 'It was a really poor first goal for us to give away — we didn’t deal with a straight ball down the pitch and we find ourselves 1-0 down.

'We’re not a high scoring team at the moment and so we gave ourselves a mountain to climb away from home. Then we came out for the second half and there was an individual error that you can’t legislate for, but we were too deep in the build-up and don’t track our runners. It’s not good enough.

'From that point it’s a really tough ask and although we huffed and puffed, we didn’t really have the conviction that we were going to get back into it. That’s hard to take.

'Bolton are a good team and if you give them a two-goal head-start then you expect it to be difficult and that’s what happened. We’re in the habit of giving stupid goals away and they haven’t had to tear us apart — you can’t keep doing that.

'We went with two number 10s because we wanted the penetration of Owen Dale and the quality of Michael Jacobs. I have to take some of the responsibility because it never came to fruition for us going forward, but when you give away the goals we did, that’s nothing to do with shape.”

Bassey also explained the absence of skipper Clark Robertson was down to a new injury: 'He picked it up in training on Friday and so we sent him for a scan and are waiting for the result of that.

'We planned for him to play and he just felt something. It’s disappointing for us and obviously disappointing for Clark. We’ve had too many injuries this season and that certainly hasn’t helped us. It’s thrown us off key and then you can see confidence seeping away.'

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