"I won’t hide from that" - Portsmouth FC chief reveals honest reasons behind Millwall postponement | OneFootball

After long days, the scheduled game between the two sides at Fratton Park was eventually postponed.

Portsmouth's chief executive, Andy Cullen, has explained the reasons behind Wednesday night's clash with Millwall being called off nearly an hour after the game was supposed to have started.

Pompey and the Lions were scheduled to meet for the first time in the league this season. The two had already met in the first round of the EFL Cup right at the start of the campaign, when Millwall emerged as 1-0 victors, but, prior to that, the two teams hadn't played each other since 2021, and not since 2012 in a league competition.

Preparations were underway to get the game going, as was being, now ironically, publicised by the Portsmouth media team, but issues with power and lighting in the stadium caused a delay in action.

This announcement of issues came at 19:47, two minutes after the game was supposed to have started. Eventually, almost an hour later, it was further announced that the night's football would not go ahead because of "safety reasons due circumstances beyond the club's control."

Portsmouth chief explains reasons behind Millwall game cancellation

The club's chief executive revealed after the game that a problem with the adjacent substation to the stadium, where a "blow out" occurred, was the reason behind calling the game off.

The lack of lighting in parts of the stadium created some safety concerns and, once it hit half-past eight, there were further concerns around the travelling Millwall supporters getting home, according to Cullen.

He said, via The News: "It’s frustrating, it’s disappointing, I’m really upset we haven’t got the game on. There was a deluge of rain last night and the groundsmen have worked tirelessly on this pitch to get it ready.

"It was a dreadful call to make for everybody, I won’t hide from that. We come here to put games of football on and we haven’t been able to do that tonight - and that’s upsetting.

"Just after 7.45pm we lost power within the stadium, we lost the floodlights, we lost a lot of lighting in the stands, we lost everything in terms of CCTV so we had a major power failure within Fratton Park.

"We got to a stage by 8pm where we were able to restore the floodlights, some of the lights had started to come back in the stands, but we still didn’t have the full capacity that we felt we would need to run a football match in front of a capacity crowd at Fratton Park in a safe manner.

"As we were getting closer to 8.30pm, it was getting quite tense because, at that stage, we were uncertain how much time we had.

"In addition, there was the issue of people getting back on trains. The game would not have been finished until well after 10.30pm, after which the last trains would have left to go back to London. That would have left a lot of people stranded, so that was an extra consideration which came into play.

"Who knows, we might have got the game on by 8.50-9pm but that would have been too late for everybody to be safe.

"The most important thing about coming to a football game is crowd safety, it’s number one. We come to watch our teams win football matches, we come to watch entertaining games, but the most important thing is everybody who comes to a football match should have the confidence that they can watch the match in safety and they get home in safety.

"Once you have any doubts about that, you have to make the right decisions."

Sky Sports were there to broadcast the game. The power issues seemingly caused problems for them too, but Cullen stated that the game would have gone ahead even if they couldn't have shown the game live on TV.

Millwall power outage causes more Pompey problems

Other results on the evening meant that John Mousinho's side dropped to the bottom of the Championship. They have games in hand, but, when you're in this position in the table, you don't want to have the pressure of having to play catch-up, even when you have more spare matches to play.

They were set to receive a slight boost, with Colby Bishop set to make his first start of the season against Neil Harris' Lions, but that, too, has had to be pushed back due to the Fratton Park power problems.

24th is never a nice position to be in, no matter how early or late in a season you are. Pompey just need to make sure that they use these games in hand to effect and use their current downtime effectively so that they don't feel overwhelmed when they have to play these fixtures that they have missed out on.