Hartlepool United manager Dave Challinor reflects on 'anger' with first half display and how he used last season's defeat at Harrogate Town to get a reaction from his players at Chesterfield

After going in goalless at the break, Pools fell behind to a Tom Denton penalty before responding quickly with two goals in five minutes completing a swift turnaround at the Technique Stadium.

David Ferguson’s cross was turned in by Will Evans to make it 1-1 before another ball in from the full-back found a teammate as debutant Ryan Johnson poked the ball into the net.

It was scrappy but the result keeps Pools’ perfect start to the new season intact.

After the match, Challinor reflected on a hard-worked three points as he said: “We knew that the way we wanted to play was by getting into their half of the pitch and being open, expansive and quick.

"I suppose the difficulty at this level is the players recognising when you can’t do that and being positive on it.

"I wanted us to play at an intensity because I knew the ball would be in play and on the ground less than it was on Saturday because they are a team who are based around set-pieces and putting the ball in the box because they’ve got players to suit that style but we’re not like that so it was about how we could stamp our authority on the game.

"Sometimes it will take 45-minutes, sometimes you can do it straight away if a team stand off but they weren’t going to do that so the game didn’t really get stretched until they had 10 men and we were in front.

"I thought we started on the front foot in the second half but if we had come in behind at half time then I think it would have been a fair reflection of the first half.

"I think they scored when we were having our best spell of the match but we reacted in a really positive way and went and got the two goals at the other end.”

Despite being goalless at the break, Challinor was far from satisfied with his side’s first-half performance, which reminded him of one of the low points from last season.

“I was angry at half-time because it had a similar feel to a game we played last season which was the Harrogate match on Boxing Day,” he added.

“We weren’t at it in the first half and went in 0-0 in that game as well, then we went on to lose 4-1.

"This match had the same sort of feeling just with how we were in the first half, we reacted poorly at Harrogate and lost but I used that as a little reminder for some of them.

"And second half we showed that a bit more and controlled the game better. It was never a penalty in my opinion, maybe it would have been given two weeks ago in the Premier League but I’m convinced it wasn’t a penalty.

"Having said that, we showed an awful lot of character to come from behind and bounce back from it.”

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