John Messina

The latest Pompey news updates every day from the Pompey Sound News Desk.

John Messina has nailed his colours to the mast about Pompey's need to increase spending, saying... Like I've said, at the moment, the plan is to build on what we're trying to do this season and be very short term.

We need to be very focused on staying in the championship now and then completely review things in the summer.

We need to look at where we are as a football club and, if we hopefully stay in the league, look at what our strategy is going to be over the next four to five years.

Then we need to go from there.

We would need to have a really serious conversation about the levels of investment required.

But over the past couple of years it's just been about consolidating in the Championship.

Then if we do that, we then buy ourselves a bit of time to push on as a football club.

I don't think there's any doubt in the Ligue 1 season everyone was saying how we recruited in the summer, January, and how much investment was there.

We went into the Championship season with a budget, and, in the first half of the season, we were undercooked in terms of where we were as a side.

We addressed that last January in the short term.

We probably tripled that in terms of the transfer budget in the summer and increased the playing budget as well.

If you look at where we are now and what we did in January, if we went back and knew what Birmingham, Wrexham and Charlton were going to spend coming up and the rest of the league, there was lessons to learn.

Maybe in terms of the rest of the championship, we have a bit of work to do there.

John Messina is reporting good news on many fronts for Portsmouth's sick and wounded.

Colby Bishop, recovering from a twisted ankle, is said to be expected to be available for Sheffield United.

But attacking options will be further strengthened in that long-term absentee Thomas Waddingham who has been out since September could also be available on Saturday.

Massino added that Colby was coming into the best form of his season when he got injured, reminding journalists he's not been scoring but he has been very very difficult to play against so his injury was a blow.

He added that we've got McKenzie and now Tom should also be available for the Sheffield United game so we're more optimistic that with Tom and being back we have three centre-forwards available.

The Pompey boss was unable to add to what is already known about injuries to shocknessy Josh Knight and Murphy.