Neville Dalton is a journalist with the BBC News website and a
Just the sort of news to spoil your summer holiday in the sun - Pompey can't afford new players until they offload some of those they've already got.
It's enough to make you drop your Chateauneuf du Pape (OK, my house red) and hurl your mobile phone out of the French chateau window for having the temerity to be the bearer of bad news.
True, my first reaction was one of horror - I thought we were made of money now; we haven't finished building our squad for the rigours of a season that includes our first venture into
And then, on further reflection… is there something even darker behind this message? Is Sasha going to cut and run? Is he about to be exposed as a paper tiger? Have Pompey spent beyond their means, and are those financial losses on the annual accounts about to prove the club's undoing?
Of course, any or all of the above could indeed be the case. But I don't know enough about the club's finances or the way it is truly run to make an informed judgment.
It's just that they're the sort of worries that spring to mind if you've been a Pompey fan long enough to remember Leyton Orient and Palace at home, let alone the decades of predominantly despair that went before.
And who would put it past Pompey, just when you think they've turned the corner, to provide the fans with the biggest let-down of all just after giving them their biggest high for more than half a century?
Yet in a funny way, as the waiter poured a second glass (OK, I was on the bottled still water by then), I felt a sort of calm relief inside me (and it wasn't the post-meal
It's true, I fear that an inability to add two or three high-class players to the current first-team squad (in other words, acquiring additions rather than selling decent players to fund new purchases and leaving the squad at roughly the same level) will put the kybosh on Pompey's hopes of improving on last season.
I'm far from alone in asserting that to go that tiny bit further this time and qualify for Europe by virtue of our league position - while trying to defend the FA Cup (sounds nice, doesn't it?) and trying to progress in our first run in the Uefa Cup - we need not just more players, but more top-notch players.
Top six
On the face of it, the equivalent of last season's squad (already minus Muntari, but boosted by the excellent purchase of Crouch) is unlikely to take Pompey beyond last year's amazing achievement, particularly when our likely rivals for a top-six finish are buying big.
The addition of the likes of Kaboul and Wright-Phillips are viewed by many of us as the clincher - the bits of business that really would put Portsmouth Football Club in the driving seat when it comes to steering a path towards European football again in 2009/10.
I feel even the bookies (who tend to be there or thereabouts when it comes to this sort of thing) would be pricing Pompey among the favourites for a top-six position then.
But not if it's at the expense of quality players currently at the club. Additions, yes. But not replacements.
Sure, we have enough middling players (especially in the midfield!) to be able to afford to offload one or two squad players.
The Hugheses, Mvuembas, the Laurens, Traores and maybe even Pamarots that rarely let the club down but are unlikely to take us to the next level.
But they're not the sort who are going to fetch the big money (at a guess, around £15m) that Pompey may need to bring in the sort of players who are.
If we're going to raise that sort of cash; if we need to raise that sort of cash to bring in just two new decent players, we're going to need to sell the likes of Sean Davis, David Nugent and maybe Pedro Mendes or Papa Bouba Diop, who - while by no means guaranteed a starting place at Fratton - represent the sort of strength in depth that I believe we'll need for the challenge of the new season.
But maybe that's it. Perhaps that's been our problem.
As I sipped my super-strong coffee, looking out over the darkening treetops of the
It's what you expect, isn't it? Every season to be better than the last; bigger names, better players to grace the blue shirt (if not white shorts).
A longer cup run (now that will be interesting!); a higher league finish; more wins (definitely a possible); fewer defeats (ditto); more home victories (after last season, definitely); more away wins (you've got to be joking!).
Best era
The fact is, Portsmouth Football Club won the FA Cup in 2008. That's this year; a couple of months ago - not some black-and-white part of our dim and distant past, when we were a decent club but virtually no one can remember.
In 2008 we finished eighth in the Premier League, still regarded by some as the best league in the world, and even if it's not, indisputably still a tough league to survive - let alone flourish - in.
And just a year earlier, we were ninth - successive top-half finishes for a club that hadn't previously achieved that for best part of 60 years.
In years to come (and maybe not that many), we'll look back on the mid-2000s and marvel that we'd lived through one of the best eras in the 110-year history of Portsmouth Football Club.
We may well yearn for those days and try to remember what it was like not only competing with - but rolling over - the big boys.
Of course, I hope we'll still be living that dream; playing the likes of Inter Milan and
I hope we'll have more trophies in the
But I have to be realistic. It's Pompey we're talking about - the team that can't fit many more than 20,000 into its ground; that struggled to sell all its tickets for a Wembley clash with Manchester United.
We've no divine right to be up there with the biggest and best clubs.
Maybe that revelation that almost made me spill my house red was a blessing in disguise, an opportunity for us all to reassess our expectations and inject a little more reality into our hopes and fears for the new season.
But if Pompey can remain one of the better sides in the Premier League and do themselves justice in all three cup competitions - and, dare I hope, achieve it by reverting to the sort of stylish football that has made me so proud in recent seasons - would that really be so bad?
Memo to
And another glass of red, please.