But I know we'll win away, some sunny day

Tomorrow marks the penultimate weekend of the season and the final awayday of this woebegone Premier League campaign.

Some may say there is nothing to play for. This blog suggests there is plenty to play for. A few thousand committed, maligned supporters who have watched the Tigers across the nation and have had very, very little to cheer when away from the KC Stadium.

Of course, the travels have produced some memorable days, for the right reasons. City were superb at Chelsea on the opening day and only lost bar a fluke goal in injury time. Boaz Myhill suffered mispronunciations of his name and mislabelling of his nationality as a consequence of the attention he got after single-handedly keeping Tottenham Hotspur out at White Hart Lane.

But the one thing that's missing from our season - apart from quality, obviously - is an away win. Hell, even Burnley have one of those. Don't spend too long trying to remember where it occurred. The point is that Wigan Athletic represents the last chance to secure a win on the road. Or, to put it less delicately, it represents the last chance to avoid becoming one of those teams whose season was so abject that they didn't manage a single away win. Even the poorest teams usually manage one.

We have only come close to it once, and that was at Portsmouth, when we led 2-1 in the 85th minute and still lost the game. For all Myhill's heroics at Spurs, we were never going to create anything at the other end. We could have won at Birmingham City but Iain Dowie's negativity put paid to that. We came from two goals down to get a point at Bolton Wanderers but didn't really get close to completing the comeback. The famous penalty earned us a point at Manchester City that was never going to transmogrify into three. Once we were pegged back to 1-1 at Wolves, we never looked likely to regain the lead and only Michael Turner's nether regions made sure we kept parity until the final whistle.

We last won at Fulham in March last year; the even more damning statistic is that is our only away win in 32 attempts. That's abysmal beyond even the standards of the Hull City teams of the darkest years in the 1990s.

There will be youngsters on show tomorrow, who will hopefully show the senior pros that survive the cut exactly what pride and professionalism is about. Dowie doesn't need to be cautious or negative any more. Play the kids, tell them to win, and tell them it's for us. We've earned it.