Wigan Athletic have history against Stoke City, away from home it ain’t good, lately there have been a lot of draws but in a match that we can’t lose Latics really have to be at their best to get a result from the Britannia Stadium.

Stoke have only lost 4 games at home all season, none since the turn of the year, but recently have had a couple of heart wrenching results that will hopefully continue this Sunday rather than spur them on to a spectacular finale.

I’d love to go back in the history books and tell you of the significance of playing on the 22nd May, but this is the first time we have played a game on this date. I’d love to tell you that we always win our final league game when we play Stoke as our final match of the season, but alas we have never done that either.

So we know the stats are useless, but I do know that we last won our final game away at Sheffield United, a team that plays in Red and White Stripes. Out of 17 final day away games we have Lost 7, Won 3 and Drawn 7.

The scenarios hovering over the final day results top 81 before goal difference and scores are factored in and so the safest thing Latics can do is win. Let the other four teams worry about their results and know we have done all we can.

We know that Blackpool and Birmingham shouldn’t get anything from their games and so a draw would be enough, but with United having already won the League and therefore are understandably fielding a team that will allow their better players to rest for their Champion’s League game (see what I did there?).

So a freak result at Old Trafford is not beyond the realms, a freak result at Spurs could also happen due to the pressure to qualify for Europe, but in a real world we should only need a draw before we take into account that Wolves are playing Blackburn Rovers.

We are going to have around 1400 very noisy fans cheering is on regardless and we all know that we CAN do it, the players just need that one more tremendous performance and then we can see if the rest of Roberto’s philosophy works out.

I for one want to see if what he said will reach fruition, this would be the end of his bedding in two seasons to build a team, a time when he said we just needed to survive to let his development take us forward in the third season.

He will have a full squad o choose from and will be playing a team that will be hurt but also in their minds be on summer holidays. Where ever you are watching this, it isn’t going to be a walk in the park.

All we can do now is get behind the lads and hope that they can do enough to win…… hope you have nails left at the end of it..

For all previous results between Wigan Athletic and Stoke City Click Here

Current League Positions

	Pld	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts	Pos
Stoke City	37	13	7	17	46	47	-1	46	9th
Wigan Athletic	37	8	15	14	39	61	-22	39	19th

Final Day Matches From History

Wigan games from this week in years gone by, click the scores for more:

	OPPONENTS	GROUND	RES	ATT.
2007	Sheffield United	Brammall Lane	2-1	32,604
1987	Brentford	Griffin Park	3-2	4,235
1984	Southend	Springfield Park	1-0	3,335
1980	Aldershot	The Recreation Ground	3-0	2,683

Fixtures

Sunday 22nd May 2011

Aston Villa	v	Liverpool
Bolton Wanderers	v	Manchester City
Everton	v	Chelsea
Fulham	v	Arsenal
Manchester United	v	Blackpool
Newcastle United	v	West Brom
Tottenham Hotspur	v	Birmingham City
West Ham United (R)	v	Sunderland
Wolves	v	Blackburn Rovers

This game and many more Wigan Athletic issues are being disucussed on the message boards, click here.

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