A full twelve months since it last happened, Reading finally won a football match away from home.  The 2-1 win at Wycombe may not have been a game for the purists, but at least it was deserved.

Nobody really knows why playing away should be so different to playing at home.  After all, it’s still 11 v 11, the grass is still green and the length of the match is still 90 minutes, give or take.

Such is the interest in the reasons behind this footballing anomaly that a huge amount of money has been spent by clubs and various institutions to try to get to the bottom of it.  

Throughout my career I’ve received a lot of letters from fans asking for this and that, but a regular request at the bottom of the mail sack comes from university students asking me questions on this exact subject as part of their dissertation.  I never get to see the findings so I’m unsure what the great unwashed make of it all but I have my own ideas based on my own experiences.

In what was probably the toughest away game that Reading could have had, fans will remember the 2001/02 season for Jamie Cureton's famous equaliser at Brentford that clinched promotion to the Championship.

But you probably didn’t notice the team that finished rock bottom that season.  Cambridge United, the side I’d toiled up front for all season long, finished with just 34 points, 37 goals and a stat that became the butt of jokes for football satirists up and down the country.  By the time the curtain came down on our last game, we had played 23 away games, drawn 6, lost 17 and won 0 (Imagine signing that striker?).

Every Saturday morning on Sky Sports Soccer Am, Tim Lovejoy would hold up our short-sleeved dark blue away shirt and ask the viewers, ‘is this the unluckiest shirt in football!?’  On more than one occasion the squad would be watching while having breakfast in the hotel prior to playing that week's away match.  Nobody ever knew where to look.  It was embarrassing.

 

That particular team was extremely young, with almost every starter under 21 years of age.  In an era before sports psychologists began to make a difference, our team regularly wilted in stadiums that were hostile and aggressive.  It was a harsh learning curve for a lot of the players and not all of them went on to have careers in the game, they just weren’t cut out to deal with that side of football.

There are hundreds of micro reasons for the away day blues, being away from your comforts etc. But I think success can depend on where you find your pleasures.  For me there was something equally satisfying silencing a whole stadium with a goal as there was scoring at home in front of your own fans.

Like so much of football, winning is a mindset.  Hopefully Reading have now found theirs.

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My new football academy - The Dave Kitson Academy - still has free taster sessions available for boys and girls aged from 5 to 23 years old. For more information, feel free to get in touch with me via my website: www.davekitsonacademy.com