STEPHEN DOBBIE has been on the books of all three Championship teams bidding to win promotion to the Premiership through the play-offs, and he sees no reason why the least-illustrious of them, Queen of the South, can't complete a fairytale rise to the top rung of Scottish football this month.

And this is a man well-placed to offer such an opinion. He is, after all, a specialist of play-off success in England where he helped three teams - Swansea City, Blackpool and Crystal Palace - into the Premier League against the odds.

Dobbie acknowledges that Rangers, the club he started his career at, and Hibernian, with whom he spent a season after leaving Ibrox, are better equipped to bolster the overall quality of the Premiership. However, as a modern-day Queen of the South legend, he helped them to a Scottish Cup Final in 2008, Dobbie has enough romance in him to envisage the little Dumfries club pulling off an upset and ending up in the top flight next season.

"For Queens to get into the Premiership, it would be massive," said Dobbie, who earned a dream move to Swansea in 2008 after scoring 54 goals in just two and a half years with the Dumfries club. "It's a great little club. They've come on leaps and bounds since I was there.

"I was up for the Paul Burns testimonial match recently and saw all the developments around the stadium. If they go up, I'm sure they would do themselves justice, just like teams such as Hamilton have. I don't see any reason why Queens can't go up.

"When I was with Blackpool, we were tipped for relegation but we ended up going up through the play-offs. It's all about having belief when you get into the play-offs. That's half the battle. There are similarities between Blackpool and Queens in that they're both small clubs compared to the others in the play-offs. They're the underdogs so they can just go out and play attacking football with no pressure on them."

The only problem for Dobbie, who spent the season on loan at Fleetwood Town from Crystal Palace, is that for Queens to go up, they will have to overcome the team he has always supported. Rangers visit Dumfries this Saturday for the first leg of the quarter-final and in the knowledge that they have already lost by an aggregate score of 5-0 on their two trips to Palmerston this season.

"I've been a Rangers fan all my life but I've got a real soft spot for Queens because of the amazing times I had there, so it's mixed emotions for the play-offs," he said. "I'll be happy whoever wins. I'm looking forward to watching the games, they'll be exciting.

"In the minds of the players they will know they can beat Rangers comfortably at Palmerston without conceding a goal. That confidence could be massive for them. They've got a great chance of beating them again, especially at Palmerston. When that place is full, it really gets rocking."

The last time Queens met Rangers in such a high-stakes match was in that Scottish Cup final of seven years ago, when the Dumfries side ran the Ibrox side close before ultimately succumbing 3-2.

Dobbie believes James Fowler's side will benefit from being on a slightly more level playing field to Rangers than was the case seven years ago. "Rangers still had Barry Ferguson, David Weir and a lot of other internationalists all over the pitch so there was a big gulf," he recalled. "We gave them a good go that day, but the gulf won't be as big now as it was then."

Dobbie never got to play in the Rangers first team before departing for Hibs as a 20-year-old in 2003. Peers like Allan McGregor and Stephen Hughes were the exception rather than the rule in an era when Rangers were able to buy in ready-made quality. "It was the likes of Ronald De Boer and Giovanni van Bronckhorst who were there in my time, so it was totally different to what it is now. I trained with the first team but I never got close to playing. I just got on with it and viewed it as a great experience and a great upbringing in football."