By Tony Leighton

Nottingham Forest are celebrating promotion to "the best League in Britain," says April's Manager of the Month Colin Calderwood after leading his team's incredible late surge to the Championship with a second place finish in League 1.

Forest looked certain to have to settle for the Play-Offs when, with just seven games remaining, they were 12 points adrift of the automatic places. Amazingly, however, they collected 19 of the 21 points available to them to finish behind champions Swansea.

That left the Play-Offs to be contested by Doncaster, Carlisle, Leeds and Southend - and Calderwood was as relieved to evade the gut-wrenching vagaries of the Play-Offs as he was delighted to automatically climb into the Championship.

Having lost out in last season's Play-Off semi-final to Yeovil - the team Forest this time beat on the final day of the campaign to win automatic promotion - Calderwood says: "There's a lot of glory and heartache in the Play-Offs, and we had the latter last year.

"It was a quirk of the fixture list that we were playing Yeovil on the last day of this season, but that was just one of the things that along with the excitement and tension involved made it a magical day for us.

"The players deserved it for the way they kept going. There were a lot of questions asked of us all through the season, but the players remained very self-assured even when it got to the stage where everybody had written us off for automatic promotion.

"We just kept picking up points in those last seven games and our away form in particular was very important. It was great to clinch promotion at home though, and now we're really looking forward to playing in the Championship.

"It's the best League in Britain. You just don't know who will get promoted, who will get relegated; unlike the Premiership it's very even, really competitive and it's going to be tremendous for the players and the supporters to be there."

As Calderwood and his players take a celebratory break in Spain, the manager - his potential Play-Off strategy thankfully binned - reckons there are no favourites to take the third promotion place via a final at Wembley.

"The Play-Offs are too hard to call," says Calderwood. "If you had to predict the winners you might as well do it by the toss of a coin, and certainly if we'd been involved I couldn't have said which team I'd have preferred to be facing in the semi-final."  

In the semis Doncaster are set to meet Southend while Carlisle face Leeds. "A lot of people will fancy Leeds," says Calderwood, "because they've gained more points than anybody in the division apart from Swansea.

"The 15-point deduction they were handed has been a motivational tool all season and that will still be the case in the Play-Offs. But don't write off Carlisle, nor Southend in the other semi just because both of those teams will be cast as the underdogs.

"If Doncaster get through to the final they'll enjoy Wembley because the surface will suit their style of play. But like Leeds they've got a tough task to get there - and I'm just so happy I'll be able to watch these games knowing that we're already up!"