Today should bring back happy memories for all York City fans. It is 20 years to the day that one of the great City teams triumphed at Wembley in the Division Three play off final.
It went to extra time and penalties. City goalkeeper Dean Kiely and defender Wayne Hall were the heroes, saving and scoring the vital spot kicks respectively.
Mark Jones, writing in The Independent a couple of years later, summed it up nicely.
In the 1990s promotion play-offs have given the York switchback even more of a white-knuckle dimension. In May 1993 , it bore us to Wembley for a titanic clash with Crewe Alexandra and the fight for a place in the new Second Division.
The sun shone, our lads sported double-breasted suits (Crewe’s were shell) and 25,000 turned up to watch. There were last-minute goals, extra time and then, oh God, penalties. City played as well as any side could with the word Portakabin on its chest. And, oh yes, we won.
But the dream didn’t stop there on that sunny Wembley afternoon. Next season, 1993 -94, was hardly an anticlimax: in the play-offs again but out in the first round. Secretly, I didn’t mind too much, not just for cardiac reasons, but two consecutive years at Wembley would have been too sugary.
