MICK Wadsworth and Sam Collins have been rewarded in style with the League One manager and player of the month awards for December.

Hartlepool United only played three times last month, but 1-0 wins at Huddersfield and Bournemouth and an FA Cup victory over Yeovil proved enough.

The manager and centrehalf will be presented with their trophies at the club’s Maiden Castle training ground this morning and they will be on show at tomorrow’s home game with Dagenham and Redbridge.

Danny Wilson was the last Pools boss to collect the award, in March 2007, while goalkeeper Dimi Konstantopoulos won the player gong in December 2006.

Pools have had a double award once before, with Adam Boyd and Neale Cooper being jointly crowned in March 2004.

With Collins still sidelined, Wadsworth is now unlikely to make a loan signing ahead of tomorrow’s game despite his interest in a Championship defender.

Pools are in a healthy spot in League One with a play-off spot in sight and after last weekend’s FA Cup loss at Watford, Wadsworth warned: “You’ve got to guard against a hangover with every game, even after you win.

“We’ve got everything going for us in that we’ve lost a couple of games, the good run in the league came to an end at Notts County and we are out of the FA Cup.

“Now it’s a case of getting on with the job at hand and that’s to finish as high as we possibly can in the league.

“No doubt a lot of people expect us to win and win comfortably but it’s not like that.

“We played them down there and it was a really tough, physical game.

“They play in a way that puts you under great pressure with many high balls.

“They have got big players and of course with not having Sam in the team then that makes me think very hard about how we are going to cope with that and impose our way of playing upon them.”

The 1-1 draw in East London was down to two own goals and Wadsworth said: “It was strange but we did enough in the game to win in the end.

“We absolutely battered them in the second half and it was probably Armann Bjornsson’s best game for us.

“Armann did really well in the second half.

“I put him under threat when he went out at half-time that he needed to win eight out of 10 headers and to be fair to the lad he did really well that day.

“It gave us a way of playing that we haven’t sort of used before and really we were the better team.”