Neil Critchley on how his Blackpool side are preparing for Sunday's League One play-off final against Lincoln City

The Seasiders are using the Bloomfield Road pitch for their training sessions and won’t travel down to London until later in the week, most likely Saturday.

Critchley’s men then take on Michael Appleton’s Imps at 3pm on Sunday, with a place in the Championship at stake.

“We want to keep everything as normal as possible, that’s why we’ve been successful for 48 games,” Critchley told The Gazette.

“We’re going to be training here at the stadium on the pitch. The sun is out, it’s nice surroundings and it’s a nice pitch to train on all week.

“We’ll head down to Wembley at the end of the week, but we want to keep it as normal as possible.

“We won’t be wearing any silly suits at Wembley, we’ll be going in our normal tracksuit attire and that’s important for us.

“We are who we are, we’re a humble group of people that represent the people of this town who are honest and hard-working and we don’t want to be any different.”

While Critchley won’t formally announce his team for Sunday’s game until the afternoon of the game, he admits the players are likely to have a good idea based on what happens in training this week.

“The players normally know 24 hours before, sometimes maybe 48 hours before because of how we train,” Pool’s head coach said.

“I don’t actually name the team until an hour-and-a-half before the game, but the players - because of how we prepare and how we train - they’ll have a 99.99 per cent idea.

“It’s never straight-forward naming the team because of the quality of players we’ve got here and each game is different.

“Lincoln is completely different to games against Oxford, Oxford is completely different to Bristol Rovers, Doncaster Rovers etc.

“We’ve shown we will pick a team we think is best to either nullify Lincoln’s threats and make the most of our strengths, and then that might alter our thinking in terms of the formation we choose as well.

“We put a lot of thought into that and that will be the same again for this game at the weekend.”

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