Town boss McGrath praises intensity and desire of his side after Shaymen's win over Hartlepool

Will Hugill's second-half goal sealed Halifax's second league win of the season, and ensured a Shay return to forget for ex-Town striker Will Harris.

"You ask for a reaction, I asked for a reaction at half-time at Altrincham, I think I got it," McGrath told the Courier.

"If we play with intensity, if we play with our work rate raised, if we play with all the desire to win games of football, then we will win games of football.

"If performances are there, the results will follow.

"Unfortunately on Friday night against Altrincham, the performance was only there for 45 minutes, so you ask the boys for a reaction and I think anybody who's come to watch tonight has seen a group of players representing their football club who want to win games of football."

McGrath changed shape for the game, adopting a 4-2-2-2 system, which he says was designed to exploit Hartlepool's way of playing.

"We looked at it on Saturday and Sunday, we watched a lot of their games, and clips, and we just figured out that their full-backs like to be the ones that go high and wide and they roll their wingers inside," McGrath explained.

"So for us, it was about maybe going the opposite way with our full-backs, keeping them at home and then we create our own little box in midfield where we exploited that space in-behind their two deep-lying midfielders and the isolation at the nack with our two centre-halves and their two centre-forwards.

"We obviously changed it and put two (strikers) up there.

"I think everybody was looking at the changes to be made might have been David (Kawa) and Owen (Bray) but we have got a really good squad and I thought the two boys that came in were exceptional."

McGrath didn't have much time to implement the change in formation from Friday night's defeat at Altrincham.

"We had Saturday off, so in-between watching my son play away at Stevenage on Saturday, taking the laptop in the car with me, watching clips," he said.

"We trained Sunday, bit of a cool-down and then we did a lot of our work on Monday, a couple of hours work on the grass.

"It's a bit boring, a bit tedious, but you see the results of it."

McGrath handed first league starts to Tayt Trusty and Amari Morgan-Smith.

"I thought Tayt was superb, really good," said the Town boss.

"He delivered loads of energy in midfield, picked up a lot of second balls and considering him and Cody picked up early bookings, they played really well. I thought Tayt was excellent.

"You know what you're going to get with Morgs, you know he's going to lead the line, he's going to wrestle and be horrible and he was a magnificent foil for Conor.

"On another day, Conor should have scored two, possibly three, so if it had finished 3-0 or 4-0 to us, there wouldn't be many complaints."

When asked whether there had been any late interest in any of his players ahead of the transfer deadline, McGrath said: "There was, but we want to keep hold of our better players because we believe something good is brewing here.

"There was a few phone calls, a few people flirting with our players but we managed to speak to the players in question and we're moving forward together as a group."