JOHN Coleman is desperate for Stanley to lift themselves from Saturday’s final-day disappointment in time to tackle the play-offs - so the champagne and flags don’t have to be packed away for good.

The Reds were ready to celebrate at a packed Wham Stadium on Saturday before the goalless draw with Stevenage, and Bristol Rovers’ 92nd-minute winner, put paid to their hopes of automatic promotion.

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That came a week after they’d hoped to seal at least third place when they travelled to Wycombe knowing a win and other results going their way would also seal League One football next season.

It didn’t happen on either occasion, but the Reds still have the chance to earn promotion through the play-offs, starting with tomorrow night’s semi-final first leg at Wimbledon.

And the manager doesn’t want it to be third time unlucky for the supporters who are getting a taste for success.

“I’ll think we’ll be the only team of the four (in the play-offs) who’ve had the champagne and the flags brought up for two games and not got them out," he said.

“Let’s hope they don’t get put away for the third time.”

Not getting the job done in the regular season rankles with Coleman, and his frustration is added to by the fact that their points total would have earned automatic promotion in the last six seasons and won the title in three of those.

He said: “Loads of people have said to me this week that you’d have taken the play-offs before the start of the season, but genuinely I wouldn’t.

“I made a statement after we played Burnley here (in pre-season) that we had a team good enough to get promoted.

“I still stand by that - I still think we were good enough to get promoted.

“But the one thing I would have taken at the start of the season was 85 points. If I’d been offered that I’d have bitten your hand off.

“I thought that would have been good enough and nine times out of 10 it would have been good enough to get you up.

“So that in itself is a remarkable achievement for this squad of players and whatever happens between now and the end of May, that’s something the players should be proud of and something that should be remembered.”

Portsmouth and Plymouth played their semi-final first leg last night, with the return at Home Park on Sunday.

But Coleman has told his Stanley players not to worry about that, and concentrate solely on tomorrow’s trip to Kingsmeadow and Wimbledon’s trip north on Wednesday night.

“Everyone will talk about Wembley and all that, but our season is Wimbledon home and away and that’s the end of it.

“Anyone talking about Plymouth or Portsmouth, go and watch the telly. It’s got nothing to do with us.

“We’ll take interest just in case, but our focus can only be on Wimbledon.

“It’s two games as a one-off tie; it can be the toss of a coin.

“We haven’t hit top form attacking-wise, we didn’t on Saturday even though we hit the woodwork three times, If we can get our attacking game going we can really give teams problems.”

Even though he’s concentrating on the Dons, Coleman knows the three others team in the play-offs will take confidence from their results against Stanley this season.

He added: “We’re going into a mini league now and you can look at it one of two ways. We finished above the other teams in the league, so we should have a good chance.

“But if you look at the actually mini league and the games we’ve played, we only took a point against Portsmouth, we only took a point against Wimbledon, and we took three against Plymouth. So that could go either way.”