Here’s my column from last week’s Leader. It forms part of the paper’s comprehensive pre-match coverage every Friday, featuring interviews, an in-depth look at the opposition and lots of statistical analysis. All content in the column (c) www.leaderlive.co.uk.

I’ve never been a great believer in mind games, but last Tuesday made me think again.

I always felt the idea that a team’s performance is influenced by what the managers say and do before a match is pure bunkum. When a full back underhits a backpass it isn’t because he was pondering whether his manager was a little indecisive in a press conference the day before. When a midfielder thumps a goal in from thirty yards, his technique wasn’t improved by a sense that the opposing bench have seemed tense lately.

I blame Sir Alex Ferguson for the growth of this phenomenon, which isn’t saying much as I blame him for all sorts of things: global warming, instability on the Korean peninsula, the failure of Jimmy White to win the World Snooker Championship. It’s fun. You should try blaming him for stuff too.

It seems to me that ever since he got under Kevin Keegan’s skin, prompting the latter’s famous outburst on Sky, the media have been given a convenient angle to use in the build-up to a match. Every time Ferguson says something, no matter how banal it might be, it’s labelled as a mind game. Every time his adversary is anything betraying emotion it’s because Ferguson rattled him. It all sounds a bit artificial to me.

Yet the way Andy Morrell handled the build-up to the first leg of the play-off was supremely assured, and made me reconsider my attitude to the whole matter.

There’s no doubt that something went wrong in the play-offs over the last two years. Luton aren’t all that great – they lost both finals after all – and we’ve been consistently beating them and, for the last two seasons, finishing a lot of points ahead of them too. But we seemed to freeze in the first leg of both encounters, and when we threw ourselves heroically into the return matches the odds were already stacked against us. Those two games were among the most heroic performances I’ve seen by Wrexham, but how could Morrell create that attitude without the tie going away from us first?

He did it by lowering expectations. In fact, not only did he lower them but he virtually killed them stone dead. I’d never seen him seem as low as he did after the Braintree game, and he all but conceded the play-offs on the spot. No doubt he was genuinely upset by Danny Wright’s injury, but in both his reactions to the press and his team selections he established us as the underdogs, and that made all the difference on Tuesday.

Rather than be burdened by expectation and collapse under the responsibility, we attacked the task of undressing the runners-up with relish. Players who were supposed to be on their last legs were back, which also gave the side a boost. There was a sense around the ground that a crafty ruse had worked. Now he needs to think of another new trick to play before Sunday!