PROFESSOR John McKenzie, the Leeds chairman, missed his club’s worst Premiership defeat, but will sack manager Peter Reid this week.

In McKenzie’s absence, new chief executive Trevor Birch sat grim-faced as Leeds, who were in the Champions League semi-final just 30 months ago, stayed rooted at the foot of the Premiership.

Birch, who has been charged with restructuring the club’s precarious finances — they announced record losses of £49.5m two weeks ago — knows that will not be possible if they are relegated and that something must be done now to arrest a slump which has seen Leeds lose eight of their past ten league and cup matches.

Although it cost £5.7m to get rid of their last two managers, David O’Leary and Terry Venables, Leeds will now sack their third manager in less than two seasons. Reid has an £800,000-a-year rolling contract and so it will cost a year’s wages to dismiss him — but relegation would cost Leeds about £12m.

A month into next season, they are due to start repaying the £60m they borrowed from four City institutions. They have only been paying interest so far and have found that hard enough. Relegation would make it nigh impossible.

At the start of October, McKenzie spent three days agonising about Reid’s position. Reid was eventually kept in the job but the suggestion was that the stay of execution was granted because Leeds were facing a particularly daunting set of matches and that a replacement manager would not want to start with such a difficult fixture list. Yesterday’s game was supposed to represent the beginning of a less demanding sequence. Instead it will represent the end for Reid.

His players visited HMS Ark Royal on Friday and that prompted two jokes at Fratton Park yesterday. The first was that they played as if they’d been on the Aurora and the second was that they now have the same prospects as the Titanic.Reid was not in the mood for gallows humour.

He looked haunted by the humiliation of his club’s worst Premiership result and the biggest defeat in the Premiership this season.

Asked the inevitable question, Reid said: “I will not resign. I will battle, battle, battle. I am not panicking but players are judged by what they do and they don’t deserve to pick up their wage packet. I don’t think I have ever had a worse 45 minutes than that second half and the biggest concern from my point of view has to be their lack of determination to win the battle. That was a bad, bad, bad day.”

Portsmouth were ahead after only 16 minutes yesterday through a header from Dejan Stefanovic and although Alan Smith equalised for Leeds three minutes later, the south coast club was able to coast to an embarrassingly easy victory.

Portsmouth were ahead again just before half-time with a stunning goal from Gary O’Neil. In the second half Leeds collected cautions and Portsmouth collected goals.

Their third came when the influential Tim Sherwood and the imperious Teddy Sheringham worked the ball to Hayden Foxe and the defender delivered a curling shot just inside left-hand upright. After 71 minutes O’Neil scored his second goal, Patrik Berger scored the fifth after 75 minutes and with four minutes remaining, Ayegbeni Yakubu completed the rout by stabbing home a rebound.

Leeds were without Mark Viduka, the 28-year-old Australian striker, who was dropped for the second consecutive week after a row with Reid. The latest spat occurred during training on Friday when, it is reported, four-letter words were exchanged. It is safe to assume none of them was “mate”. Reid dropped Viduka and fined him a week’s wages. The striker stomped off saying to other Leeds players: “If you want to go down, stick with this fella.”

Substitutes: Portsmouth: Stone (Taylor 84min)

Leeds: Pennant (Sakho 56min), Junior (Bridges 72min)

Referee: C Foy

Attendance: 20,112

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