Dave Challinor on how Hartlepool United will handle busy schedule and travelling ahead of National League trip to Ebbsfleet United

After beating Yeovil Town at the second time of asking on Tuesday evening, Pools travelled straight back up to the north east, returning in the early hours of Wednesday morning before coming back into training on Thursday.

It’s been as busy a start as Challinor could have hoped for going into Saturday’s National League match at Ebbsfleet, a near 550-mile round trip.

And when discussing how the team will handle the schedule, the Pools boss said: “It was a late one after Yeovil, the players have got to look after themselves.

“It’s just building on what we’ve just done. In the first session we did, we started with a shape and we changed and worked on potentially changing our shape and the players took that on board massively and applied it with two 10-minute 11 v 11s on Monday.

“It’ll be bright, it’ll be sharp but we need to be careful in terms of what we’re doing.

“It’s been a difficult week, it’s been a different week and so we still want to implement things but again it won’t be an overload of different information.

“We’ll try and drip-feed little things into them in terms of what we do but it is different in terms of how people do it.

“Today will be an intensive session in small areas, brighter stuff but certainly not covering big distances which, again, hopefully with the travelling we’ve done will help them tomorrow.

“We’ll travel tomorrow, train on the way down, just some game prep, depending on what we get through today.

“We’re all focused on Ebbsfleet and hopefully performing in a manner like we did on Tuesday and getting the same result.

“You have to be adaptable and with the personnel we have on the pitch, we were able to be flexible and change our shape and that’s the big pleasing thing.

“We give the players as many of the answers as we can but the majority of them are still in the dressing room and they have to find them on the pitch.”