Nahki Wells and his Bristol City team-mates will have to go on the attack tonight if they are to keep their Premier League hopes alive.

Bristol City enter the second leg of the Sky Bet Championship play-off final needing to claw back a three-goal deficit after a disastrous defeat at home to Sheffield United in the first leg on Thursday night.

Wells was substituted at half-time in that match as City coach Liam Manning was forced into tactical changes after central defender Rob Dickie was sent off for a professional foul on United striker Kieffer Moore.

City have appealed against the red-card decision, with a decision on Dickie’s availability only likely to be given in the hours before the game at Brammall Lane.

Manning feels that it would be wrong to count City out and is expecting a big performance.

“We’re definitely not down and out and that has to be the mindset of everybody,” Manning said in a press conference on Monday.

“It’s funny, naturally you tend to look at comebacks and the history of comebacks, and I’ve gone back through loads and spoke the other night about the League One play-off a few years ago.

“You go back to the Champions League final, which we were laughing about this morning, the Milan-Liverpool one. We were chatting to a few of the lads about that, which was quite funny because there were quite a few of the lads who were born after 2000, so there were a few who were either not born or still in nappies when that game happened.

“That’s the beauty of it; if you throw the towel in now, that speaks volumes about you as a person and a professional.

“I’ve had to fight to get into the position that I’m in, having had numerous setbacks, not making it as a player. So I’ll be fighting until the final whistle tomorrow night and I’ll be expecting the same of the lads, but that has to be underpinned by a huge amount of belief.”

The winner of the tie will face either Coventry or Sunderland in the Championship play-off final, with that tie more delicately poised after Sunderland won the first leg 2-1.