HARTLEPOOL United lost on the road again at the weekend prompting a ‘fuming’ Dave Challinor to urge his players to question their current contributions.

They lost 2-0 against Salford City thanks to goals from Tom Elliot and Matty Willock at Moor Lane in a result that means Pools have picked up just one point away from home in League Two.

The away form this season will be given another chance to be corrected tomorrow night when Challinor’s side travel to Valley Parade to take on Bradford City.

The Pools boss told the media after the game at Moor Lane that there was frank conversations in the dressing room but asked whether that garnered a reaction, he told BBC Radio Tees Sport: “Not a reaction from enough.

“We’ve got a very open changing room, no matter where your hierarchy or where you feel you hierarchy sits in the dressing room. You’ve got an opinion or you want to say something to someone and you can back up that opinion with evidence to support it, then crack on.

“It doesn’t happen enough and again those people will say it’s modern football and people don’t like to be told. They like to be managed properly and arm round the shoulder. Great for arm round the shoulder but it’s difficult to put an arm around the shoulder when there’s no context to it in terms of people.

“There’s a time and a place but people need to improve. This is their careers. I have more concern about their careers than they have about their own.

“And it’s a collective. It’s not a case of we’ve not scored away again so it’s the forward players. That’s rubbish.

“It’s a collective across the board of every single player in that dressing room and every single member of staff because the ones that aren’t potentially in the squad or aren’t on the pitch in order to affect, they should be asking themselves the question, why aren’t they?

“If we do that, we’ll be fine. At the moment, we’ve got to be better than we were. I’m more than happy to give us pats on the backs when we don’t get what we deserve from our performances in terms of what we’ve produced but it was far from that. We’ve got exactly what we deserved and that’s the first or second time this season I can honestly say that.”