Quote Originally Posted by Eric the Half a Bee View Post
Great read as usual, Bob. Your opening salvo about 1-0 away wins setting the scene for a good season planted a seed in my head that needed researching!

The season with the largest number of away 1-0s over the last 20 years was the 2017/18 promotion winning season. We won 5 away from home with that scoreline that season. Here's a list of promotion winning seasons since the start of the 80s and the number of 1-0 away wins:

82/83 1
87/88 4
92/93 3
98/99 2
00/01 0
02/03 4
12/13 3
17/18 5

The standout figure is the 2000/01 season where, on the 6 occasions we scored 1 away from home, we managed 1 draw and 5 defeats. The last time we failed to register a single 1-0 away win was in Russell Slade's only full season. It might also be worth noting that we've won promotion in 82/83, 92/93, 02/03 and 12/13. I predict promotion in 2022/23, but I'm not saying from which division we'll be promoted!

In terms of more recent successful City managers, Neil Harris tops the 1-0 away chart with a third of his away wins being 1-0. Lennie Lawrence comes next with 32%, then Malky and Warnock both with 29% (both won the same number of away games and the same number of 1-0 away games). Dave Jones managed 26% of his away wins at the scoreline of 1-0. The lower the 1-0 percentage, the higher the percentage of away wins with 2 or more goals. This suggests Jones's away teams were more free scoring than the others.

Lennie was a bit of a master when we scored only 1 goal away from home. We won 31% of league away games, with obviously the same clean sheet percentage, when we scored 1 and conceded only 1.09 goals a game. Both Warnock and Jones managed to win 25% of league aways when we scored 1 and conceded 1.58 and 1.52 goals a game respectively. Warnock did have a season in the Premier League though. Malky's away win percentage of 21% when scoring just 1 goal is the worst. Harris's record stands at 57% with 4 clean sheets out of 7. The 1.29 goal conceding rate due to the QPR collapse.
Thanks for that Eric, that figure for 00/01 is no surprise as it felt at the time that 4-3 (with one of the goals conceded being stuck into the net by one of our players!) was a more typical score with that team!

Lennie Lawrence was a great believer in the importance of the game's first goal and I have the distinct impression that a team that scores first and then concedes an equaliser is more likely to go on to win the match 2-1, 3-1 etc. than lose it if it does not end up 1-1.