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Exclusive:'Something's got to give': Portsmouth boss targets urgent departures after signing ex-Celtic man The 20-year-old made six appearances for Celtic in the second half of last season John Mousinho is considering cutting two central defenders from his Pompey squad following the arrival of Benjy Arthur. The highly-regarded Brentford youngster today joined the Blues on a season-long loan, having finished last term with Scottish champions Celtic. It once again leaves Mousinho with six centre-halves on his books, having last week offloaded Ibane Bowat to Huddersfield in a bid to reduce bloated numbers. As a consequence, Arthur will compete with Conor Shaughnessy, Regan Poole, Hayden Matthews, Madiodio Dia and Josh Knight for the two starting spots. Although with Pompey clearly carrying too many defenders at present, their head coach admits he may have to move two of them out before the transfer deadline on September 1. ‘It probably means we’re going to go with four centre-halves altogether.’ Mousinho told The News: ‘Benjy is going to add a really good dimension to that defensive unit. He’s quick, powerful, strong, who is excellent one-v-one and aerially dominant. ‘He’s also very calm and composed on the ball, as you would expect for someone coming down from the Premier League and having played the amount of games he has, particularly for Brentford’s B team and under-21s, plus Celtic last season. ‘It probably means we’re going to go with four centre-halves altogether. Although there's an argument with some of the injuries we’ve had in that unit to go with five for the season. ‘Historically, we’ve had to carry more centre-halves than we necessarily might have liked from a squad-building perspective. At the minute, everything is okay with the centre-backs, but, historically, we haven’t really had that. ‘There’s something which is going to have to give there - it just depends on whether it’s one or two (going out). ‘There’s no interest at the moment in those players because we’ve only just bought Ben in, so we’ll see how that situation progresses. They are all fit, while we also had three on the bench at the weekend.’ Six centre-halves on Portsmouth’s books Mousinho’s long-time favoured partnership Shaughnessy and Poole started in the centre of defence for last weekend’s Carabao Cup defeat at West Ham. Pompey begin their Championship campaign against QPR at Fratton Park on Saturday, with Arthur available for selection, along with his five centre-half rivals. Yet Mousinho believes Brentford loanee may not be ready to start for the Blues. ‘He is probably not ready to start’ He added: ‘He is probably not ready to start on Saturday due to the fact he’s not had that exposure to the level where we’d probably like him to. ‘If we are looking at starting lads in a league game, we’d probably want them to have played between 75 and 90 minutes in a pre-season. ‘That’s what we did for the majority of the boys against Darmstadt, the only exception being Swanny (Zak Swanson) because we’ve had to build him up since he came back from his injury. ‘Apart from that, we have to be careful with building lads up - and Benjy’s had a big week now in terms of the upheaval and everything which has gone on with the transfer. ‘We’ll see how that settles down, it won’t take him long, but maybe not for the weekend.’