Yeah, you shouldn't have been there anyway you bastards, seems as the team you knocked out on penalties in the semis finished 3rd to your 6th, 8 points ahead of you (with the feet off the gas for the last 6-8 games), beat you twice in the league and were clearly the better side out of the two.
Not that I am bitter or anything.
So to the question, it's a tough one for me. If I go parochially, it's a tough call. Our most recent promotion and one of our finest hours came when we beat the filth at Wembley in 91, we finished 5th to their 4th, 4 went up so yeah that promotion spot should rightfully have been theirs. And as heartbroken as I was in 93, 94 and 95 when we missed out on promotion to the Prem via the play-offs, if I look objectively we should only really have been in the hunt for promotion on one of those occasions, 95, as on the others the propsect of automatic promotion was long gone before the season's close.
My most recent play-off experience, I alluded to it above, and it for me counters the argument of "dead games" being a good reason for the play-offs to exist. There were only ever three teams that had a chance of going up automatically that season, us, Luton and Hull. Hull won at our place in early March to all but put an end to our hopes, and then last minute goals against us and for them a few weeks later made it a no-hoper. This left us in third with about 6, 7 maybe 8 games left. There was zero chance of us finishing anywhere but 3rd really, given we still had to play teams such as Stockport and Peterborough who had been unable to buy a win all season. What this made for was some of the dreariest football I had ever seen, the play-offs were in the bank, we had no chance of catching Hull, that was that. Sure, the opposite happens to teams in 11th/12th more often, but do they really deserve it over a team that hasn't been outside the top 3 since October? Hell, no. Look at Watford's recent form - admittedly they nearly missed out altogether, but their decline has been surely partly down to the end of the automatic promotion dream. League One and Two's play-off spots were all decided prior to this weekend yet the top 2 race in League One was alive, it would have been even more exciting had there been another spot going, instead what I saw at PP last Saturday was a disinterested Southend side that were going through the motions, waiting for the play-offs.
In 93-94, we finished 5th, and I mentioned earlier that we stormed into the play-offs in fantastic form, with automatic promotion long out of sight. However, under the old "3 straight up" system, we would have had a chance. Going into the last day, us, Millwall, Derby and Leicester had just home advantage in the play-offs to play for, under the old system, we would have all been battling it out for 3rd spot.
Check the table out
No, I don't agree with the play-offs. But for them I probably never would have seen Nevin, Aldridge, Stevens in Tranmere shirts, but the way I see it is if you finish above a team over 46 games, you deserve to be promoted more than they do.
Having said all that, they are usually great spectacles (compared with more high-profile and usually cagey semi-finals), the best match I have ever seen as a neutral, from an entertainment POV was Sunderland-Charlton in 99, and I accept that they are here to stay. Brian Little and the Tranmere team knew at the start of the season that we needed to finish 1st or 2nd to go up automatically, and Little should have kept the players motivated, it was a complete lack of momentum that saw us lose to Hartlepool in the 1st leg, we turned it round with one of the best performances of my 17 years in support in the 2nd leg and it wasn't enough. I agree with Halsey's suggestion, though, of having 6th play 5th, the winner playing 4th, with 3rd already guaranteed a final berth, or something like that.
Oh, and I don't see how 24 teams is too many? It's just right IMO.
