Depressing stats in Championship require seismic change at Tigers
MCCANN’S ONLY EARNED 15 POINTS FROM 102
Grant Mccann is a head coach who bases an awful lot of his planning around stats. To hear him talk after matches, the Hull City boss will often reflect on the numbers within a game, just as he did at Huddersfield when he suggested his side had almost 30 crosses, none of which were taken advantage of.
Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at Luton Town was City’s third in a row and ninth in their opening 14 games of the Championship seaason, a sixth successive game on the road without scoring - the worst run for 21 years, and another stat which doesn’t make for great reading.
There is, however, one stat which will continue to haunt Mccann until such a time as he can turn around an alarming run of form which is threatening to undermine all his efforts of last term.
In his last 34 games as a manager in the Championship split between the ill-fated 2019-20 campaign and so far this, the Tigers head coach has presided over 25 defeats and just three wins, with two of those coming against Middlesbrough and their manager Neil Warnock.
During that spell which is effectively just 12 games short of a full 46 game league season, City have drawn six, scored 26 and conceded 73.
From a possible 102 points available, Mccann has collected just 15, nine of those have arrived in 2020-21.
Overall in the second tier, Mccann’s record stands at played 59, won 14, drawn 12 and lost 33 collecting 54 points from a possible 177.
That dreadful period started with a 1-0 home defeat to Fulham on January 11, 2019 and so began a run of five straight defeats, before a 1-1 draw at home to Reading ended that particular sequence.
City were then beaten 3-0 at Blackburn Rovers before drawing 4-4 in a chaotic game with Swansea City on Valentine’s Day.
By the time the season was curtailed because of the pandemic, City had lost four more times including a 4-0 home defeat to Leeds United and 5-1 thrashing at Stoke.
When the campaign resumed in June behind closed doors, normal service resumed for City losing 1-0 at home to Charlton before earning a 3-3 draw at Birmingham City, though they did beat
Middlesbrough 2-1.
That success over Boro proved the only success in the remaining seven games, as Mccann’s men went on to lose their remaining six and suffer a humiliating relegation.
League One was a welcome line in the sand for Mccann, winning 27 games and guiding the club to its first title in 55 years.
Those celebrations continued throughout the summer and into the first game which saw Mccann mastermind a stunning 4-1 win at Preston.
That result and performance suggested lessons had been learned from before, but it looks to be the exception rather than the rule.
The rule has been losing games and not scoring goals - in their final 20 matches of the 2019-20 season,
City failed to score in 10 of those, including the final four, losing 16 which has now been well documented.
Since Deepdale, City’s six away games have yielded no goals for, two draws and four defeats; form which has seen the Tigers go from leading the division after the opening weekend to being third-bottom in the division, one place and one point above Yorkshire rivals Barnsley - the pair meet at Oakwell a week on Saturday.
Mccann has been determined to not repeat the mistakes of a season which will forever haunt him, unfortunately, those mistakes are being replicated to leave the club and its supporters with an inherent feeling of Deja-vu.
There are numerous mitigating factors that have not helped his cause; Jarrod Bowen, Kamil Grosicki, the ownership fiasco, transfer embargoes, small budgets, injuries and the like.
He is a manager at the end of his tether - again - and unless there is a seismic change, that desperate record is only going to take further hits before it gets better.