Wignall's time in South Yorkshire - and subsequent trials and tribulations - is chronicled as part of his engrossing autobiography You Can Have Chips!, with the "new" Rovers certainly a different entity to the one he was associated with.
Playing wise, Wignall earned his footballing spurs under Maurice Setters in a youthful Rovers side in the early to mid 1970s after joining from hometown club Liverpool.
Wignall's Belle Vue stint as manager- from May 2000 to December 2001 - was a time when Rovers were ensconced in the Conference, with expectant fans baying for a return to the Football League.
That arrived on a spring day at the Britannia Stadium in Stoke in May 2003, with the Division Three championship following the next season.
Matters culminated in Rovers' League One final win over Leeds in front of 70,000 at Wembley last May ensuring elevation to the second tier of English football for the first time in half a century.
Wignall wasn't destined to preside over the glory years, but somewhere along the line, he'd like to think he laid a few foundations.
Signing fellow Scouser Franny Tierney - who he dragged from the footballing scrapheap - was certainly one for starters, with the midfielder scoring the golden goal that saw Rovers return to the Football League.
Philosophical about leaving the stage before Rovers achieved their potential, Wignall, who wrote his book with wife Anne, said: "That's the way it goes, I was a bit disappointed and I suppose Dave Penney (who managed the club from 2002 to 2006) feels the same.
"i always thought at the back of my mind: 'if I can just stay on and get us to the new stadium, we can kick on'.
"John Ryan (the chairman) wanted me to turn it around and start the club going in the right way. People might look at it and say it wasn't a great time, but the club were still on the slide when I took over.
"And that's no disrespect to the Snodin brothers, who got the club back on its feet and tried their best to take it to the next level.
"We started to turn it around.
We got a new training ground and things were going the right way.
"Dave Penney then took over at the club and it took off from there and I now can't see them going back to where they were.
"I left Doncaster and they brought in the play-offs the next year. When I was manager, you had to win the championship and the next year Dave had taken over and won the play-offs."
"But the longer I was there, the more I understood the expectation levels. they were ridiculously high in the Conference, but the potential was there because the fanbase was phenomenal.
"Doncaster and the area is a real hotbed with the likes of Sheffield United, Wednesday, Barnsley and Rotherham nearby.
"Now people will walk down the road in Doncaster and see lots of Donny shirts.
"I was shocked at the expectation levels when I arrived. I couldn't wave a magic wand, that was never going to happen at a club that was virtually out of existence two or three years before."
All manner of things went wrong for Wignall during his time managing the club, with the biggest blow coming when wife Anne fell seriously ill.
He added: "Everything that could go wrong - in my personal life and everything - did. It was a shame as I worked really hard for some really good people. John (Ryan) was a smashing bloke - it just didn't happen.
"On the pitch, every striker got an injury or had problems. We had three or four strikers capable of scoring 100 goals (between them).
"Barnsy (Paul Barnes) scored against Manchester United in pre-season and I never had him, Carl Alford scored 25 or 30 goals every year in his career and hardly scored a goal for us, while Justin Jackson was the best scorer in non-league history and then couldn't score. Lots of things happened that were out of my hands.
"My wife fell ill during my time at Doncaster. The fall out from that was massive, it's not a sob story. Those are the facts and the book tells how we coped with it and we coped all right."
Rovers' recent sunshine-and-roses years have contrasted markedly with their problems just over a decade ago.
Wignall was present on the club's darkest day when the perennial strugglers dropped out of the Football League in 1998. He was manager of promotion-chasing opponents Colchester in front of a sombre Belle Vue crowd
He recalls: "I remember Doncaster's last game in the Football League.
"The whole day was strange with the coffin cortege to the ground, the whole place was so down.
"To be honest, I thought the club would go out of business - if it hadn't been for John and Peter Wetzel, I think they would have done. They saved the club and put it where it is now, especially John.
Belle Vue may be now long gone and the club's goalposts moved in every way, but at least the bulldozers went in for the right reasons with the upwardly-mobile Rovers moving on from the antiquated ground across the way to the state-of-the-art Keepmoat Stadium.
But Wignall still remembers his playing days at the old ground with fondness, with the defender carving out a niche as a solid centre-back under the stewardship of Setters.
He tasted some halcyon days, most notably in the FA Cup in 1974 when lowly Rovers almost stunned Bill Shankly's Liverpool.
Wignall said: "Coming to Doncaster was a bit of a culture shock for me as a Scouser. It was a different culture, but I loved it.
"I had trials at Coventry and a few clubs were sniffing around. But Maurice Setters was the most positive at Doncaster.
"He was very much for young players and had a good record over the years. He had brought through Mike Elwiss, Peter Kitchen, Terry Curran and Brendan O'Callaghan in their late teens.
"That was Maurice for you, we either sank or swam then!
"It was tough, we were struggling in the bottom half of the league, what is League Two now. Like anyone else I was glad to be playing in the Football League and it toughened me up.
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