Niall Quinn

EXCLUSIVE: The former Black Cats' player, manager and chairman starred in a documentary on the club long before Netflix cameras pitched up at the Stadium of ...

"Sunderland fans, people who have worked at the club - they've had it tough," he added. We've been here before of course, and I hope I'm right, but this feels different this time." The Black Cats are in the League One play-off final against Wycombe at Wembley. With around 45,000 Sunderland fans making the trip down, it promises to be a special occasion. After retiring, he was named chairman of the club in 2006 and even had a brief stint as manager before taking a back seat and returning to his upstairs role. "I never wanted to be involved in a situation with film crews like that again. "For those who were making mistakes during that period, it was very polarised and very public.

As a player, Quinn suffered the agony of gut-wrenching play-off defeat in a penalty shoot-out against Charlton in 1998, and the Black Cats' luck was no ...

We know the team they are facing have a rock-star manager (Gareth Ainsworth) who gets every last drop from his players, but this Sunderland team will not be pushovers.” When Jermain Defoe came back, everyone thought he was going to score the goals that won promotion – but that fizzled out. And since his spell as chairman at the Stadium of Light, Sunderland have extended their gift for losing major Wembley finals to almost 50 years, dating back to the 1973 FA Cup triumph against Leeds.

While the club may have allowed the Netflix cameras through their its doors thinking they were about to capture the highs and lows of their glorious return to ...

I never wanted to be involved in a situation with film crews like that again. I was part of one (documentary) many, many years ago called Premier Passions. Sometimes nowadays at 4am it comes on weird channels! For those who were making mistakes during that period, it was very polarised and very public.

Alex Neil pipped Roy Keane to the Sunderland job in February, and Niall Quinn is a huge admirer of the job the Scot has done.

But Quinn hopes that will change tomorrow, and that a new image will come to define Sunderland's play-off history - one that sees the team holding aloft the play-off trophy as 46,000 fans decked in red and white celebrate promotion. There was a guarantee and a commitment to come together and start the next season from Game One - we didn't give the teams a 10 or 12-game start as we had done that year, which meant we missed out on automatic promotion. "He has possibly done it through old-fashioned management of individuals, getting them to believe, getting them together as a group and making them play together as they have. He wasn't the preferred media choice, there was a huge interest in the fact that Roy Keane might get the job, Jermain Defoe had just been brought in and he was going to get the goals that got us to the play-offs, but those two things fizzled out. Because of that, Sunderland fans can dare to hope again and they can go into this game - even with the terrible record that the club has in these type of matches at Wembley - there is something different about what this man has done in the last two or three months that makes you think they are playing at a different level. There's an inner belief within the team, the players are stepping up to the plate and, quietly, the manager has in two or three months probably put the players and the team into a better position than we have seen for a long, long, time.

There's a question often asked in the Quinn household, the sentiment of which will be immediately understood by any Sunderland supporter.

"The level is different and I appreciate it, but I just feel that... "All Sunderland fans are the same, there's going to be emotion and drama. In Alex Neil he sees a manager who has managed to block out the outside noise and keep cool throughout the pressure of the run in, which he feels could be crucial on Saturday. "You have the first couple of weeks of his tenure and then all of a sudden these late goals are starting to appear," Quinn says. "The players don't seem to be playing with a burden, they're playing with a passion and for each other. "It's going to be a good day out and I do have a good feeling about it."