Mark Robins felt his Stoke City team were "good enough" to deserve the three points after they beat Portsmouth 1-0.
The Potters manager told BBC Radio Stoke: "The performance was good enough, first half especially, I thought we were really good and should have been 2-0 up.
"We didn't take those chances and gave the opposition the encouragement to remain in the game when we should have put it to bed.
"They smelt that and came out in the second half to put us under a lot of pressure to start with, but we also put ourselves under pressure with a lot of strange decisions, but had a brilliant goalkeeper who made a great save.