Carlos Carvalhal on how to prepare for Championship play-offs

With the regular Championship season over, all eyes turn to the play-offs this weekend as four teams compete for the final Premier League promotion place.

Aston Villa face West Brom while Derby play Leeds in what are bound to be mouthwatering semi-final first leg encounters, live on Sky Sports.

With the culmination of a whole nine months coming down to effectively what are three cup finals, how do teams and managers approach the games?

Sky Sports Football caught up with former Sheffield Wednesday boss Carlos Carvalhal, a man who twice narrowly missed out on top-flight promotion via the play-offs, to find out....

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So Carlos, is the psychological approach any different from that of league games? And if so, how?

All games are the same when a team simply has to fight for the three points, but there are some special games and play-off matches are, without doubt, special ones.

They're knockout games and you know that if you lose, you're out. Meanwhile, in the league, you can lose a couple of games and still achieve your target.

Given that they're special matches, they call for some specific preparations: as well as tactical and strategic elements, it's also important that the team works on concentration and on being fully focused.

On the one hand, you have to be focused (not make any mistakes and go out and do what you've worked on in training) and competitive, but, at the same time, continue to enjoy your football and maintain the desire to win.

How did you prepare for the run-up to the 2016 play-off final with Sheffield Wednesday?

It's important you head into the play-offs feeling fresh; the Championship is a long marathon and it's very tiring from a physical and mental point of view.

The teams that fight until the end of the season to gain automatic promotion and ultimately don't achieve it are left feeling massively disappointed and can struggle to react quickly ahead of their play-off semi-final tie.

For example, in my first season at Sheffield Wednesday, we finished sixth and beat Brighton, who had collected 15 points more than us, in the play-offs.

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The fact that we clinched sixth spot in the final run-in boosted the confidence and motivation levels amongst the players and the fans. That was crucial to us beating a Brighton side that was wounded after having missed out on automatic promotion on the last day.

The teams that are sitting comfortably in fourth and fifth can start to prepare for the play-off semi-finals by resting some of their players and this can hand them an advantage if they reach the final.

In our second season at Wednesday, we finished fourth, which was higher than we had done the previous year, but ended up losing on penalties to the fifth-placed team (Huddersfield) in the semi-finals and they went on to win the play-offs.

How big a challenge is it to rebuild a team in the immediate aftermath, and the season after, failing to achieve promotion through the play-offs?

When you don't know why you lost a play-off final it's very difficult to repeat the formula the following year. What we did was to start working on next season after the final.

We prepared things in terms of our attitude and approach and that of the players. We took advantage of the positives of having reached the final to try and do better and set new targets.

Our aim in the second season was to do better than we had in the first year. We managed to do that because we went from a sixth-placed finish to fourth.

We didn't lose any of the two semi-final matches but penalty shoot-outs are also part of the game.

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