“We know we can beat them..” Barnsley boss fires warning to Sheffield Wednesday ahead of League One play-off final
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A 2-1 aggregate win at Oakwell was enough to earn the Tykes their spot, with midfielder Liam Kitching scoring the all-important second leg goal.
Despite the nature of Wednesday’s remarkable comeback win over Peterborough United on Thursday evening, Barnsley will enter the clash with confidence, suggested their manager Michael Duff, who also took time to pay testament to the Owls’ record-breaking season.
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Hide Ad“We’ll enjoy it,” Duff said in the aftermath of their qualification. “It’s a South Yorkshire derby as well, for this part of the world you can hear what it means to everybody. We’re really looking forward to it.
“In two games we beat them twice but that really means absolutely nothing. We’ll prepare and we’ll try to see the last bit through.”
Barnsley were the team to end Wednesday’s 23-match unbeaten run in the league back in March after they had earlier won out 2-0 at Hillsborough. Though Duff was keen to stress the results were not important, he did make clear they had given his players plenty of belief going up against their South Yorkshire rivals.
Much was made of the age gap between the two sides, with Barnsley having gone as far as to write-up the ages of the Wednesday squad in the build-up to their Oakwell win.
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Hide AdAsked what he expected to see from the Owls, Duff said: “They’ll be very, very good. They’ve been up there all season and I think Darren has smashed every record going. So we know the challenge ahead, but the few losses they have had, we’ve been two of them.
“We know we can beat them. There’ll be no arrogance, we know we’ll be up against it.
“They’ll be the favourites, no doubt, but this group have been written off from the start. When I came in in the summer everyone said we were useless, we’d sold all the players, we lost a few games, we went a month without scoring and everyone wrote them off pretty quickly.
“But we’ve stayed together, stuck together and you can see what happens after that.”