Wimbledon boss hoping it's third time lucky for Dons against Cobblers

The two teams have already met twice this season and both games were won by Northampton. A Cameron McGeehan double helped Town to victory at Sixfields in a league game just before Christmas, and then Kevin Nolan’s side triumphed 2-1 at Plough Lane in the Vertu Trophy last month.

“We know what they're about for sure,” said Jackson. “We’ve had two tough games with them and obviously haven't got the results that we wanted, but we know what we feel like we can exploit.

"Both times they got the better of us so it's important that we take that into account and we try and brush up on the things that have cost us in the past. I think there's a lot of learning from that league game at their place, where we were actually playing pretty well first-half and then 10 minutes after half-time took the game away from us.

“Despite where they are in the league, they're fighting and on their day, they're capable of beating anyone, so we have to be ready. It’s a big game.”

Wimbledon arranged an intra-squad friendly in the week to prepare themselves for Sunday’s fixture.

Jackson added; “We looked at a few different options about whether we could actually have a friendly against different opposition, but it was tough to find anyone to play on the day we wanted, so we just decided we had enough numbers to do it, where we just had a friendly between us.

“We can manage the minutes that way and it just made more sense. The reason behind it was that I felt there's a few lads in the squad that definitely need some exposure to 11 v 11, that haven't played in a while.

Some of it was based around what we feel like Northampton are going to do. So there was obviously some stuff that we tried to implement so both teams could get a chance to come up against what the type of test that we feel like we're going to have.