Portsmouth head coach John Mousinho has taken big pleasure in watching Josh Murphy’s “renaissance” after the winger played a massive part in Pompey’s 2-1 win over QPR.
Winger Murphy spearheaded a three-minute Pompey blitz where he curled in a stunner before brilliantly setting up Matt Ritchie.
Murphy helped Oxford secure promotion to the Championship last year before becoming a crucial player for Portsmouth this year – with six goals and nine assists – having dropped from the Premier League to League One in five years.
“He was absolutely superb,” said Mousinho about Murphy.
“We have been encouraging to get on the inside shoulder and he is such a threat on the outside, but we’ve seen players overcompensation on that side so if you can go both ways at the full-back is useful.
“The goals is the only things that he has been missing this season.
“It has been an amazing renaissance from him after having a few years in the wilderness.”
Murphy had lit up the match after an insipid second half to set up Portsmouth’s third victory in a row, which moved them nine points clear of the bottom three.
Mousinho said: “It is massive to get the three wins and there were elements of the performance that were superb.
“I thought our reaction to a poor and tepid first half was good, both teams looked a bit scared of playing but we came out for the second half and got the small moments right.
“It feels good to be nine points clear of the relegation zone but the important thing is making sure we know we haven’t cracked it.
“There are still plenty of points to play for so we have to be on it for every minute of every day.
“We want to take the appropriate amount of confidence from winning games but we don’t want to get carried away.”
Jimmy Dunne pulled one back for QPR with a sensational lob over Nicolas Schmid with just over 15 minutes to go but they could not find a grandstand finish.
And boss Marti Cifuentes pointed at the early second-half display as key to the defeat. He said: “It was a disappointing result and a disappointing performance.
“We knew we were coming to a pitch that is very intense from both the stands and the way Portsmouth play.
“It wasn’t easy to impose our way of playing as they pressed so intensely.
“The start of the second half was bad and costly for us.
“Unfortunately Murphy scored a good goal because he is a good player and then we took a little bit of time until we understood how to react.
QPR fans had been dreaming of a promotion push after six wins in their first nine matches of 2025, but Cifuentes has more guarded aims.
The Spaniard, whose side are seven points adrift of the top six, said: “I don’t talk about play-offs, I talk about going one game at a time and focus on how we can win.
“First of all I want to achieve the 50 points which usually mean you are safe and then the next step is to improve what we did last season – which was 56 points.
“If we win the next four games we have 56 points then we can dream.”
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