Our showdown with Doncaster Rovers kicks off at 3pm on Sunday. It’s live on Sky Sports, with ITV showing highlights in the early hours of Monday morning.

Wembley has been designated as ‘public transport venue’, mainly because the new stadium is much larger than the one it replaced, so there is even less room to provide parking on-site. Unless you’ve already pre-booked parking at Wembley (at a cost of £40) don’t attempt to drive all the way to the stadium, as there is a residents-only parking zone covering a radius of one and a half miles around the stadium, which will be strictly enforced. 

The parking at the outlying tube stations has already sold out, but Wembley’s website recommends you can park at one of the following Chiltern Line railway stations - Warwick Parkway , Banbury,  Bicester North , or High Wycombe.

If you’re going the whole way by train you’ll need to get the metropolitan line to Wembley Park, which will no doubt be packed, out as the Circle line isn’t running. An alternative is to walk from Kings Cross to Euston and get the stopping service to Wembley Central, though unfortunately the faster trains on that line are replaced by buses due to engineering work.

It goes without saying that food and drink inside the stadium will be ridiculously expensive. But there is a designated Leeds pub 250 yards from the stadium, the ‘Green Man’. It has a half acre beer-garden, and will have an outdoor BBQ from about 1030 am, and there will also be an outdoor bar. It is due west of the stadium in Dagmar Avenue (over the roundabout at the end of Royal route where it crosses Wembley Hill Road). 

 The new Wembley was originally due to be ready by 2006 (and was the centerpiece of England’s unsuccessful bid to host the World Cup that year) but in the event it wasn’t finally completed till a year later. Much of the delay was down to the bickering between a certain Ken Bates, (who was in charge of the project at one time) and the then sports minister Kate Hoey, who wanted the stadium to include a running track. Bates wanted to incorporate all sorts of hotel and leisure facilities as part of the project, as a larger version of his Chelsea Village, but was removed from his post by the FA after the estimated costs started to run out of control. It’s tempting to say that this doesn’t augur well for the similar plans that Bates has to develop the land around Elland Road! By the time the stadium was eventually completed it was well over budget, and at £798 million it was the most expensive stadium ever built! 

Wembley’s official website has all sorts of interesting facts about the stadium. The footprint is 103,000 square metres, it is built from 212,000 tonnes of concrete, and it has 14 km of fibre optic cable. There are 688 refreshment kiosks, though due to “the responsible sale of alcohol”, you are limited to two overpriced drinks per transaction. Thankfully there are 2,618 toilets, (more than any other venue in the world) which are in a much better condition than those we had to wade through at the old stadium. The sliding roof can cover the whole stadium, and that huge arch (which is bigger than the London Eye) helps to support the weight of the roof.

The stadium has a capacity of 90,000 (the largest in the world with every seat under cover) and both clubs have been sent an official allocation of 36,000 tickets for this game. Most of the remaining 18,000 seats are in the corporate areas, the ones opposite the TV cameras that are usually empty. The FA had to make the executive parts of the stadium so large in a desperate attempt to claw back some of the huge amounts of money they spent in building the damn thing in the first place. 

 The decision to give the two clubs an equal number of tickets has led to a lot of the problems we’ve seen this week, not only the chaos at Leeds when our allocation fell well short of demand, but also Doncaster being forced to take their tickets off general sale. By yesterday Rovers had only sold 22,000, and they are now selling only to those already on their customer database, having belatedly realised they were being snapped up by Leeds fans and ticket touts. But rumour has it that up to 6,000 Leeds fans had already got tickets from that source, so it could be quite lively in their end on Sunday!

The weather forecast for Sunday isn’t great, but here’s hoping for a great day out, including a decent result!

Here are more details on how to get to Wembley

A few pubs near Wembley are listed here

Food outlets near Wembley

Photo: Action Images

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