Dominic Scurr's verdict: The cost of Hartlepool United's avoidable postponed trip to Dagenham & Redbridge in the National League

To summarise, Dave Challinor’s side travelled over 500-miles to Dagenham and back, staying overnight in a coronavirus ‘hotspot’ to essentially look at a frozen pitch and return home.

It’s a journey that risked player and staff safety as well as costing the club a considerable amount of money, believed to be around £5,000.

The Government has advised against all but essential travel during the pandemic, and this was certainly a trip that never should have been made.

This is no fault of Pools of course, they tried everything they could to get Saturday’s National League match against Dagenham & Redbridge to go ahead as planned.

They delayed travelling down on the Friday afternoon until they had been given the go ahead that the match was on and even offered to play the match at Victoria Park where the forecast was slightly more forgiving than it was in East London.

Pools want to continue the season and have the resources to do so, but this is the third time this season that they’ve made a long away journey with an overnight stay only to have it called off at the last minute. They had the coronavirus postponement at Barnet late on Friday night and the half-time abandonment at Eastleigh back in November.

At the moment clubs need every penny they can get and you have to question how many more incidents like this can Pools really afford?

The mess with the National League has got to the point where Dover Athletic have taken matters into their own hands and cancelled their season unless appropriate funding can be provided. They simply do not have the money to continue operations.

This is the situation we’re in, it’s tough, yet Hartlepool are travelling the length of the county, wasting £5,000 for no real reason at all.

You can accept frozen pitches and postponements – Pools know all about them even just in the opening weeks of 2021 with three at Halifax Town and one at Dover.

What leaves a bitter taste this time around is just how avoidable this was.

As Challinor said afterwards, there needs to be accountability for this one. Frozen pitches happen, but this is something a quick glance at the forecast could have told you on Monday. Instead, Pools had to wait until an hour before kick-off before having the postponement confirmed at the Chigwell Construction Stadium.

The Hartlepool boss declined to suggest the club were misled in anyway, it wasn’t as strong as that and it certainly wasn’t intentional by Dagenham or the match officials.

But the fact of the matter is that Robert Whitton, the match referee, declared the pitch playable on Friday. Around 24-hours later, following a lengthy inspection, the pitch was then declared unplayable and frozen.

According to Challinor, the pitch was clearly rock solid and unsafe from the moment you stepped onto it and the referee’s 45-minute inspection was yet another waste of time. With sub-zero temperatures throughout the day, it was always bound to happen.

But the big question is, was the pitch ever playable to begin with?

It’s difficult to say without seeing it first hand but by the sounds of it, no it wasn’t. Dagenham claimed to have voiced their slight concerns with the referee’s decision on Friday and the club’s ground staff told Pools that the pitch was in better condition on the Saturday when it was called off than it was on Friday when it passed.

Ultimately, it’s the referee’s job to make that decision and Dagenham risked making a rod for their own back if they were to disagree with it.

On Saturday evening, the Daggers released a statement effectively relinquishing responsibility for the postponement and stressing that it was down to the match officials.

They also said they turned down the offer to play the match at Victoria Park on ‘player well-being’ grounds. It’s understandable that they didn’t fancy a 265-mile trip up to Hartlepool having made journeys to Wrexham and Notts County in the seven days prior.

Also, the Chigwell Construction Stadium also has one of the best records in the National League for getting matches played in spite of the weather so their confidence in getting the game to go ahead wasn’t entirely misplaced.

But as a result, Pools are giving Dominic Cummings a run for his money when it comes to unnecessary journeys between County Durham and the capital – and not for the first time this season either.

It’s irrelevant now but had Dagenham agreed to play the match at Victoria Park on Saturday, it’s very likely that we would have seen a game of football.

So will Pools get compensated for this wasted trip? We can hope but this is the National League, so don't count on it.

And as tough as fans not being allowed into grounds has been on clubs, it should be a blessing when it comes to rearranging matches and getting them to go ahead. Full-time clubs are in a position to literally play whenever they like to ensure matches take place.

We’re not restricted to 3pm Saturday and 7:45pm Tuesday night kick-off times anymore. Hartlepool’s next match at Eastleigh on Tuesday night will see the sides kick-off at 5pm.

Hopefully this will be the time that Pools finally play a game of football away from Victoria park, because it has been a while!

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