‘Two week break didn’t impact performance’ insists Hartlepool United manager Dave Challinor following defeat surprise defeat at Weymouth

Pools had won their last four matches in the National League but had played just one game in January prior to their visit to the Bob Lucas Stadium to face a struggling Weymouth side.

The match ended 1-0 to the Terras’ with Pools being reduced to 10-men following Luke Molyneux’s straight red card.

It had been two weeks since Challinor’s side beat Wealdstone 3-1 it Victoria Park in their previous game. Postponements at Halifax Town this month have starved Hartlepool of competitive action as they set up a friendly match against Sunderland under-23s on January 13.

But Challinor declined to use a lack of matches as an excuse as he told The Mail: “It didn’t impact things, we’ll look at our physical data and see where we were at but for me we didn’t look like a team that was disjointed and not creating anything.

"We just came up against a team who banked in, got men behind the ball and made things difficult for us as you’d expect because they’ve been struggling.

"You can’t play well all the time and things can get frustrating but when they do you just need that bit of luck and the ball to drop to the right person at the right time.

"You want to be scoring first in games like this in order to draw them out but that certainly wasn’t the result of them not playing. We didn’t look rusty, we just couldn’t break them down.”

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