“You’d sit in the front, you’d get your orange juice or your Wagon Wheel or your scalding-hot Bovril from the tea urn behind, and it was just amazing. The atmosphere alone. I had hair in those days, and it would make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up!”
It helped that United were then the best team in the country, of course. But a few years after Munich, both Gardner and Crook began to notice a creeping change to the energy on the Stretford End. The subsequent decades would bring some of the terrace’s most joyous moments, but also some of its most frightening.
1965-1989: WE ARE THE MANCHESTER BOYS
“I stayed on the Stretford End until the early 60s,” explains Digger. “The Stretford End group disbanded around then, when some of us started courting and getting married. Around then the Stretford End seemed to become a ‘thing’ like it is now – more of a mass.”
Now old enough to go on his own, Crook and his mates from Stretford Grammar quickly established their own spot on the ‘right side’ of the Stretford End. Other groups of teens did likewise.
“The comradeship, the camaraderie was brilliant,” he remembers. “You went with your mates and you had your spot, week in, week out. Nobody dared come in your spot and if any interloper did, you’d shift them. The tunnel had its own gang, the left side was Ashton, Middleton, Salford… Stretford and Wythenshawe was right side. You were with your best mates; some you’d grown up with, and others you’d just see at weekends. The Stretford End was one big meeting place.”
With Best, Law and Charlton approaching their peak, the Stretford End was the place to be. And with fans typically in the ground hours before kick-off, there was plenty of time for making friends, getting creative with chants and, inevitably, mischief.
“It would be rammed and all of a sudden a gap would appear,” chuckles Crook, “and the dare would be you’d go in the gap and the crowd would come piling down. You’d get stuck and crushed to bits. But it was good fun at the time – you might get a cracked rib or two, but everyone just got on with it!”
But by the mid-’60s, more dangerous incidents were starting to overshadow this type of good-natured jostling, signalling the hooliganism that would haunt football through the 1970s and ’80s.
“In 1965, Everton made an attempt to ‘take’ the Stretford End,” Tony says. “They came up from the bottom, and a bloke at the front pulled this big sword out of his coat. Obviously, people backed off, but then everyone got brave and the older lot charged towards them and ran them out of the ground. The ’60s was when the hooliganism started, certainly.”
But although such hair-raising moments could erupt at any time, Crook admits this period also provided some of his greatest memories as a Red. Yes, the Stretford End could be dangerous, but its explosive youthful energy was also harnessed to create some of the greatest atmospheres ever seen in England.
