Doncaster Rovers died on May 2, 1998. To mark their club’s passing, a few hundred supporters invested in a coffin and marched behind it from Doncaster town centre to their Belle Vue ground opposite the racecourse. After performing the last rites, bugler Ken Hawley played The Last Post and they watched their team lose 1-0 to Colchester United and tumble out of league football, 15 points adrift and with a goal difference of minus 83.

In that surreally disastrous year, attendances had dropped to just 739 when Barnet visited and, against Brighton And Hove Albion, one David Smith got a game in goal, chiefly on account of being the neigh-bour of manager Mark Weaver, a former manager of Stockport County, albeit of Stockport County’s lottery. That year, incidentally, neighbours Leeds United finished fifth in the Premier League.

Belle Vue was more Beirut than belle. The main stand had almost been burned to the ground in 1995. By 1999, Ken Richardson, the Isle Of Man-based Rovers owner-chairman (or, as he insisted on being known, “benefactor”), was beginning a four-year jail term for conspiracy to commit arson. Finding the actual firestarter was one of South Yorkshire police’s less taxing manhunts, for the former SAS soldier that Richardson paid £10,000 to do the combustible deed had left his mobile phone at the scene of the crime.

Richardson reluctantly relinquished control. Enter John Ryan, based in Knutsford but a son of Doncaster, a former Rovers director and one of the nation’s leading plastic surgeons (Melinda Messenger’s breasts are his work, rather than, say, nature’s), who had first visited Belle Vue in 1958 and watched Jimmy Hill score five as Fulham won 6-1. “I should have known then . . . ” he says, smiling.

Ryan bought the club for £50,000 and made four promises: to return Rovers to the league; to secure them a new ground; to take them to a major cup final and to restore them to the second tier they exited a few weeks after hurricane Hill’s heroics. “Let’s be honest, people thought I was completely off my head,” he says.

Three years later, Rovers were still battling to escape the Conference, while Leeds were losing in Valencia in the Champions League semi-finals. Today, they meet as equals at Wembley for a place in the Championship, a game Ryan estimates to be worth £4m to his loss-making club, plus £400,000 “solidarity” payment from the Premier League, a place Rovers have never graced but Leeds seem to feel they inherently belong.

“There’s no inferiority complex,” says Ryan. “It’s pointless feeling inferior to people you’ve never associated with. We’ll win, because we have a better team.” And, for all of Leeds’ doughty efforts in overcoming the Football League’s deduction of 15 points, Rovers will be the neutrals’ pick.

Rovers rejoined the Football League in 2003. Last year, they swapped Belle Vue for the council-funded Keepmoat stadium, the centrepiece of a £32m complex just off the M18, which they rent for £250,000 a year. They won the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy in 2007 and if they succeed today, they will fulfil Ryan’s fourth and final promise. “People said that it [reaching the second tier] couldn’t be done,” he says. “I might have been nuts, but I had the vision, so I’m the focal point of the club, the driver and the ambition. And if we don’t do it now, we’ll do it next year.”

In truth, it should never have come to this. Rovers travelled to Cheltenham on the final day of the season proper knowing that a win would secure them automatic promotion. Instead, facing a team who needed to win to ensure safety, Rovers found goalkeeper Shane Higgs in the form of his life and returned home pointless.

“Basically, we were just complacent,” admits centre-half and erstwhile former Leeds trainee Sam Hird, no relation to former Leeds stalwart Kevin. “We went there thinking we’d already won it and it came back to haunt us. They were more determined and more organised than us.”

And so Doncaster Rovers were cast into the playoff semi-finals lottery, where, after holding Southend United to 0-0 in Essex, they sunk the Shrimpers at the Keepmoat. James Coppinger, who had scored just three goals all season, doubled his tally in one career-changing evening with a lambent hat-trick as Rovers won 5-1.

“I got the rub of the green,” admits the Teessider overmodestly. “But that game showed how much we had learned from the Cheltenham experience.” A Middlesbrough fan whose father took him to Wembley to see his team twice in 1997, Coppinger played under Kenny Dalglish, Ruud Gullit and Bobby Robson at Newcas-tle but only the last-named introduced him to the St James’ Park crowd and then only in a brief substitute cameo against Tottenham Hotspur, whose goalkeeper that day, Neil Sullivan, also once of Leeds, will be guarding the Rovers net today.

With a year left on his contract and his future wife studying at the University of Teesside and therefore tied to the northeast, Coppinger found first-team football 370 miles away at Exe-ter City. “I was lonely, big style,” he admits. “And while it’s a nice part of the country, I prefer ICI factories and transporter bridges, and they’re not so passionate about football. As soon as I’d struggled back home it was time to turn around and go back down to Exe-ter, but the experience made a man of me, it made me what I am today.”

After manager Dave Penney left in August 2006, Ryan cast his mind back to a game at Dean Court in September 2004: “We lost 5-0, the only time in recent years we’ve been slaughtered. Bournemouth played wonderful football.” Bournemouth’s Sean O’Driscoll was Ryan’s only candidate and on moving north was given the task of ensuring Rovers played in the manner of his former charges on that fateful day. “The fans didn’t take to him,” says Ryan. “I took a lot of flak, but nobody’s telling me to get rid of him today.”

Ever the wary, wily old pro and one who chaperoned Bournemouth through the playoffs in 2003, O’Dricoll plays down today, but insists that Rovers will not be distracted from their normal passing game by Leeds’ less aesthetic thrust. Whereas Leeds travelled south as early as Wednesday, Rovers braved the bank holiday traffic on Friday, before popping into Wembley for a quick reconnaissance.

“It’s not a day out: if we wanted that we could buy tickets for a Wembley tour,” explains O’Driscoll. “This is work. Southend is over, finished, but if my players need any more motiva-tion for this game, they’re wasting their time being footballers. We’ve tried to keep things simple this week, because the bigger the game the more you have to retain the basics. We’re the underdogs and we’ll have fewer fans, but at the end of this game, we just want to be able to say we’ve achieved something.”

Raising a famous old club from the dead is, it seems, just the beginning.

Doncaster v Leeds: a decade of contrasts

- The fortunes of Doncaster Rovers and Leeds United have been travelling in opposite directions since 1998

May 1998 Doncaster leave the Football League after conceding 113 goals and winning just four matches. The fans march through the town carrying a coffi n, right, to mark the ‘death of Doncaster Rovers’. Plastic surgeon John Ryan takes over as chairman. Leeds fi nish fi fth in the Premier League, behind the Big Four

May 2003 Francis Tierney’s golden goal means Doncaster defeat Dagenham & Redbridge 3-2 at Stoke in the Conference playoff and rejoin the Football League. Leeds have slumped to 15th in the Premier League

April 2004 Nearly 10,000 squeeze into Belle Vue to see Cambridge United beaten 2-0 and Rovers are promoted. They go up as Third Division champions. Leeds are relegated with Wolverhampton and Leicester

January 2007 Huddersfi eld Town are beaten 3-0 in the fi rst game at the Keepmoat stadium

April 2007 Graeme Lee’s extra-time winner helps to defeat Bristol Rovers 3-2 at the Millennium stadium and win Doncaster the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy. Leeds finish bottom of the Championship

May 2008 Doncaster face Leeds United at Wembley for the right to play in the Championship

League One playoff final Doncaster v Leeds Utd

Today, Sky Sports 2, 2.30pm, kick-off 3pm