A look at how Saints have fared at Bristol City over the years.

Saints head to Ashton Gate looking to score their first win in the League at the ground in nearly 32 years, although in fairness we have only played them twice in that period.

Of course we did win their 8 years ago in the Carling Cup, when 4,000 Saints supporters made the trip to Ashton Gate to boost the crowd to over 17,000 and saw James Beattie, Brett Ormerod and Graeme Le Saux score ina comfortable 3-0 win.

But in the league wins have been a little more harder to come by, three seasons ago we went down 2-0 on the way to relegation to League 1 and the season before that it was a narrow 2-1 defeat.

Then its all the way back to our last win at Ashton Gate, for some reason the game was played on the Friday evening before Xmas 21st December 1979 to be exact and although conditions inSouthampton were cold, the travelling 1,000 or so Saints fans were faced with heavy snow as they neared Bristol, the game was played in a blizzard, which wasnt very pleasant for the travelling fans who were on a exposed open terrace, with only 12,489 braving the elements it was a cold cold night warmed up only by a Mick Channon goal on 54 minutes that gave us all two points.

We had a couple of seasons playing them in the mid 70's, as covered in another article we drew 1-1 in February 76 and in the previous season went down to a 2-0 defeat.

In 1966/67 we might have expected to beat them being in our first ever top flight season when we visited in the FA Cup, but we went down 1-0.

But there is some good news for those of you who like omens, in 65/66 season, our promotion year to the top flight for the first ever time, we travelled to Ashton Gate on good Friday for a fixture where two teams both vying for promotion would do battle, over 25,000 where in the ground to see Saints benefit from a Connor own goal on 13 minutes and weather pressure to keep their first clean sheet in five months and crank up the red & white machine, three days later on Easter Monday City came to the Dell in the return and although Mick Channon scored a goal on his debut it took a 90th minute equaliser to give Saints a vital point in a weekend which was pivotal, if the Robins had won one and drawn one as we did they would have gone up and not us.

Apart from that its been sparse pickings at Ashton Gate, a couple of games in the 50's saw two defeats, and the flurry of meetings in the 20's and 30's saw only one win recorded out of 6, that being in season 1931/32, 80 years ago and a couple of weeks.

This leaves a grand total of only three league wins at Ashton Gate in our entire history, so if we can win there this weekend it will be something that doeant happen very often, to be blunt there wont be many people in the away end that will have seen us win once there in the league, perhaps no more than a few dozen who were at both the 1966 win and 1980 and as for someone who has the complete set, well they would need to be approaching 90 at the youngest, so if Saints do record a win on Saturday, enjoy it, victories at Ashton Gate in the league are very rare occurrences.        

Photo: Action Images

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