Gareth Ainsworth has urged his Wycombe Wanderers squad to heed the lessons he learned during his playing days and savour the occasion when they step out at Wembley for the League Two play-off final. 

When Preston North End pitched up at the old Wembley for the 1994 Division Three play-off final against the Chairboys they had a young Ainsworth among their ranks.

The Wycombe boss was just 21-years-old at the time and admits the game, which Wanderers went onto win 4-2, and the occasion had passed him by.

“You think you’re infallible,” he said. “You think you’re going to get there more times than you do in your career but in 26 years of being in football I’ve only been to Wembley once, so take heed people because it doesn’t come round very often.

“It’s a special occasion and I think that when you’re older you take more in anyway. When you’re younger you let things pass you by, and the defeat didn’t help either so maybe subconsciously I wanted to forget about it.

“I had my moments there but I hope that history repeats itself with Wycombe Wanderers winning and that it doesn’t repeat itself with Gareth Ainsworth losing. Those are the two things that I want to happen.”

Ainsworth said it’s an “amazing irony” that Wycombe are the constant theme between the two matches and that the club’s opponents in 1994 will also be at Wembley this year, a day later in the League One play-off final.

The Blues boss is hoping to take his team for a look around the national stadium on Friday before they head back to their hotel, so that his players can get acclimatized to their new surroundings. He said: “We’re going to try and get there and make sure that when they do walk out on the pitch it isn’t the absolute first time that they’ve done it.

“To prepare them is going to be important and also I don’t want anyone to be in awe of anyone or treating this game any different.

“The football on the pitch needs to be the same, the consistency needs to be the same as it’s been all season and we want to treat it as we would most games.”

Managing in a play-off final is unchartered territory for a man who is coming to the end of only his second full season in charge of the club.

Phil Brown will be prowling the technical area beside Ainsworth on Saturday, a man who guided Hull City to the Premier League via the play-offs in 2008, but that’s unlikely to affect a manager who has spent the whole season defying the odds.

“We may be the first team that doesn’t fill their bench at Wembley. I’m sure they’ll fill theirs but I think there’s about 20-odd seats behind the dug-out and I don’t think we’ll fill all those because we haven’t got enough players, so we’ll be stretching our legs out and making ourselves comfortable,” said Ainsworth.

“It really is a fairytale story – where Wycombe have been this season. When we started the season not one fan would have envisaged this.

“If I’m honest, I thought we had a good squad together but I wasn’t thinking that we were going to be one of the top three, which we nearly achieved, and I wasn’t even thinking of the play-offs. It just came and maybe that’s a good thing.”