Denver Hume, a former player for Sunderland, has received an update from Portsmouth manager John Mousinho.
Despite transfer rumors surrounding the former Sunderland player, John Mousinho, the manager of Portsmouth, has declined to drop Denver Hume from the starting lineup at Fratton Park.
During the match against Leyton Orient last week, head coach Mousinho gave the left-back his first senior Pompey appearance in seven months.
“It takes a bit of time if you haven’t played football at a competitive level for such a long time,” the head coach stated to The Portsmouth News. “Especially with Theo Archibald in their side, who is a real stalwart of their league side and a good player. His last game was Morecambe in April.”
“He settled into the game really well and had a hell of a job to do. Sometimes it was 2v1, and he had to stop crosses and get out to the ball, and he did it really well.
“The situation at the football club at the moment isn’t ideal for him; we’ve made no bones about that, but he gets his head down and trains hard. When we’ve got a session on matchdays, he comes in with lads that aren’t in the squad, he does his running, he’s right up there, and he has a really good attitude towards everything that he does.
“That’s what we saw on Tuesday night because, no matter what happens with Denver at the football club going forward, he has shown he can compete, he has shown he is capable of coming in at very short notice, and fair play to him.
Hume departed Sunderland for Portsmouth back in 2022 for a fee of £200k, but has struggled with injury issues and was put up for sale by the League One club last summer. The move to start Hume represented a surprise turnaround in policy from Portsouth’s manager, who said in October that Hume wouldn’t feature in the EFL Trophy for Portsmouth despite being fit.
“We knew Denver wanted to leave in the summer and are absolutely fine with that. We had a grown-up conversation about it but couldn’t make it happen in the transfer window.
“Who knows if he will leave in January? We obviously still have two left-backs in the building and I think Denver will have aspirations to play a lot more minutes. “But this is a key part of our season; you never know what’s around the corner, and if Denver hadn’t kept his head down and done his work, we wouldn’t have put him on the sidelines; it wouldn’t have been beneficial to him.
Despite being transfer-listed, Mousinho has refused to exile Hume, and the former Sunderland man continues to train with the club. He added, “I am very young in my head coaching career; you never know what’s around the corner, but we want to treat people properly if we can.
“Sometimes numbers don’t work out in training and players aren’t involved, but we always keep them around the first team as much as possible.
“Denver traveled to Chesterfield on Sunday. We knew he wouldn’t make the team, but we still wanted to get him acclimated to the team and give him a chance to play on Tuesday. He’s a well-liked guy among the boys, and whatever happens with Denver, he has put a lot of credit in the bank.”
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