Steven Schumacher admits promotion would 'mean everything’ as he aims to lead the Whites to success at Wembley.
Schumacher knows Wanderers will face a serious test against a Stockport County side which finished the regular season two points and two places better off than the Whites in the League One table.
But having battled past Bradford City with a 2-0 aggregate victory in the semi-finals, Schumacher has put his team one more win away from a season-long goal and a place back in the Championship for the first time in seven years.
“That was the brief at the very start of the season,” said the Wanderers’ boss, who also tackled County on the opening day of the campaign. “We want to be in the mix, we want to try and get ourselves into the Championship. We feel as though we've earned this right to be in the last game of the season and now it's about trying to perform to the best of our ability and make sure that we get the job done.
“It will mean everything, it really will. It's been the objective since I came to the club, to try and get into the Championship, so it's going to mean so much. But we've got a lot of work to do. We know we're 90 minutes away, potentially, from achieving what we all set out to do and let's hope we can go and do it.”
Wanderers have tackled their third play-off campaign in four seasons and head back to Wembley two years on from a painful final loss to Oxford United. With captain Eoin Toal sadly ruled out of a return with a hamstring injury suffered in the second leg of the semi-final win at Bradford, Josh Sheehan will be the only survivor from the starting line-up beaten 2-0 by the U’s.
Midfield colleague Ruben Rodrigues was on the winning side that day and Schumacher believes his players will be well equipped to handle the challenge – backed by close to 30,000 Wanderers’ fans who could also have a huge part to play on Sunday.
“They (the players) understand what it looks like,” he added. “Some have got positive experiences and others have had not positive experiences that they can learn from. We go there with a good mentality, a good frame of mind that we know that if we perform as well as we can, if we stick together as a group, then we've got enough in our squad to get the result that we all desperately want.
“It's a huge credit to the amount of fans that are going down. It's a Sunday, early kick-off at one o'clock, not easy to get to on a Bank Holiday weekend with train disruption all over the place, so for people travelling down we really appreciate it and we're going to do our best.”
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