Walsall book extract: A packed Banks’s as the Saddlers reached Wembley Stadium

The Banks’s Stadium was packed for the second leg, which only happened a handful of times during my Walsall career. What made it unique was that the great majority of spectators were Saddlers fans.

I’ve played in games when the ground has been full but we’ve given two sides of it to away fans, either because we were playing a big Midlands club in a pre-season friendly or a team that had dropped down to League One from a much higher level. But that night the Banks’s was full of Walsall fans who wanted us to finish the job and get to Wembley.

The expectation among the fans had been building throughout the day and you could sense their growing excitement. They’d been to work, chatted about the match all day and were clearly up for it.

The fact that it was a night game also gave it a special feel. It’s an absolute joy to play in that sort of atmosphere and you can feel yourself feeding off everybody else’s energy. You want every game to be like that.

It’s not always easy to go into a second leg with a lead as you don’t know exactly how to play it. You can sit back and defend, but that just invites pressure. Dean’s approach was to pick the same team as he had for the first leg and tell us to ‘go out and do it again’.

That made it easier for us as it meant playing as we normally would, rather than trying to do something novel. The early part of the game was quite tense, with the two-goal lead playing on our minds a bit.

We knew that getting to Wembley for the first time was such a big thing for the club and the fans, so we really didn’t want to let that lead slip.

Momentum can be really important in football and we knew that conceding a goal would give them the impetus to push on.

We therefore tried to keep the score at 0-0 for as long as possible and it was still goalless at half-time, which was fine with us.

We didn’t change our plans for the second half. Our overriding desire was not to do anything silly that would give them a leg-up and allow them back into the tie, though it would be great if we could get a goal. Preston had some very good forwards and were flying high in the league, so you knew that if they got one goal, they could get two or three quite quickly. We kicked towards our fans in the second half and were much more of a threat, with Bradders, Fordy, Romaine and Tayls all going close with shots and headers on goal. It would have relieved a lot of pressure if we could have scored, but we just couldn’t get the ball over the line.

Preston weren’t giving up on the tie and they brought Sylvan Ebanks-Blake on for the last half an hour of the game. There aren’t many League One teams that can take a player like Kevin Davies off and replace him with someone who, on his day, could be even better.

It was difficult to keep them at bay and there were times when we had no choice other than to barricade the goal and put bodies on the line. Preston were kicking towards their own fans, which added to the anxiety of it all as you could hear their fans willing them to score from behind the goal. It seemed like every 30 seconds a player was asking the referee how much of the game was left. The first time he was asked he replied, ‘20 minutes’ and someone in our team replied, ‘Seriously?’ Personally, I’d rather not know how much time is left to play as it can just be a distraction.

A copy of the book can be bought by visiting: www.pitchpublishing.co.uk/shop/walsall-match-my-life.