By Tony Leighton

Doncaster Rovers will become a Championship club for the first time in 50 years if they beat Leeds United in Sunday's League 1 Play-Off Final at Wembley.

While Leeds have spent the majority of the last half-century in the top flight, along the way winning the title three times, Donny have fluctuated between the two lower divisions of The Football League and also had a five-year stint at Conference level before climbing back to League 2 via the 2003 Play-Offs.

Leeds will on Sunday be favourites with most pundits, but Sean O'Driscoll's team will be in confident mood after bursting into the Final with a sensational 5-1 victory over Southend United in the second leg of their Play-Off semi-final.

Not that manager O'Driscoll, whose side had battled out a goalless draw at Southend in the first leg of the semi, is shouting from the rooftops as he prepares his players for one of the most important matches in the club's 129-year history.

The ever-cautious manager says: "I suppose Leeds will be favourites, but I don't think Gary McAllister will put that message across to his players. He's too experienced and too good a manager to do that.

"We've both got one foot in the door of playing in the Championship and we'll do our best to make sure it's us that goes through the door."

Leeds boss McAllister, whose team reached Wembley with a 4-1 aggregate semi-final victory over Carlisle United, was at the Keepmoat Stadium to watch Donny's super-show against Southend.

He will undoubtedly have been impressed with what was Donny's finest performance of the season, capped by a tremendous hat-trick by winger James Coppinger.

Some Donny fans fear that their team peaked one match too soon, but O'Driscoll insists: "That performance was not a one-off. We've played like that for the majority of the season but without scoring as many goals in one game. We've not got one outstanding goalscorer, but we can get goals from all over the team as that game showed."

Coppinger's hat-trick doubled his goal tally for the campaign and he will be out for more of the same at Wembley. But he and his colleagues, says the 27 year-old winger, will head into the Final totally focused and not over-confident following their semi-final heroics.

"When we got back into the dressing room at the end of the Southend game," says Coppinger, "there were no big celebrations, it was all very muted - it was no more than if we'd played okay and got three points in a League game.

"For me that was a great sign - it showed that we all knew the job's only half done and that we've got to be really on our game to get the result we want at Wembley."