Grant McCann's latest bold Doncaster Rovers prediction as abroad pre-season plan revealed
Grant McCann has once again consulted his crystal ball as Doncaster Rovers look to plot a successful second half of the season.
The last two campaigns have seen Rovers recover from below-par starts to finish strongly, achieving an unlikely play-off spot in the 2023-24 season and then leading the team to the League Two title 12 months later.
The latter achievement came after McCann told supporters in January last year, at a Meet the Owners event, of his bold intention to catch then-leaders Walsall - something they duly did. Now, with Rovers currently struggling at the bottom end of League One the Northern Irishman has again given supporters hope of another strong finish.
As it stands, Rovers are 22nd in the standings and a whopping 18 points off the play-off spots. But another old McCann trick from seasons gone by - a synthetic league table pinned up in the Cantley Park training ground canteen - is helping to give the players added motivation to rise up the rankings. At the Meet the Owners event, McCann was asked by a fan how big of a stretch would it be to make an unlikely bid for promotion this season. And whilst he stopped short of saying the top two was doable, he refused to rule out another far-fetched play-off tilt just like two years ago.
"To catch Cardiff and Lincoln is a massive stretch," McCann admitted. "But we've got a couple of games in hand over some of the teams in the top six and we haven't written it off yet, let me tell you.
"There's 18 games to play for and a lot of points to play for. I think the squad is in a good place. Do I think we will we get there? I don't know, but we will give it our best shot. What I will say is we'll do everything we can and we've not wrote it off.
"We've set the players a 22-game table and if we can stay around the top two of that, we won't be far off the top six in the bigger table at the end of the season.
"It's irrelevant where teams are at this stage. It's where they are after 46 games in May. And we've got a real belief we'll have a really good second half of the season."
Meanwhile, McCann also confirmed that the club are looking to finalise a pre-season trip over to Ireland in the summer.
He added: "We have plans and hopefully it'll will be some good news for fans.
"We want to try and bring the team over to Dublin in the summer. Adam (Grice, head of football operations) is working really hard on that. It's been a long time since we've done it as a club. We want to get the fans with us and we want to get two or three games out there and have maybe an open training session for fans to come and watch. So that's something in the pipeline.
"I think that'll be a nice start to pre-season where we can be together in the summer and that should be good."
Rovers have visited Portugal and Spain in recent years but did not stage friendlies or open training sessions, meaning supporters were unable to follow their team abroad.