Hooliganism- An article about the Red Army in the 70s

[kiko]

Unthinkable as it might seem today with its seemingly bottomless pit of wealth, back in 1974 mighty Manchester United suffered the ignominy of relegation to the old second division. A large number of supporters set out to claw back some respect by becoming the largest, most violent and feared thugs in the land.
Monday, March 26, 2007

Liverpool, week beginning 20 October, 1975. The anticipation is almost electric as the weekend draws nearer. This will be the first clash between Liverpool and Manchester United for nearly two years, and the intense rivalry has been ratcheted up to fever pitch by the tabloids. It’s not a case of whether there will be trouble – but how bad it will be. United spent the previous season in Division Two where their travelling hordes gained a fearsome reputation as the biggest and wildest mob in football, smashing all before them. Above and beyond the countless incidents of trainwrecking and window-smashing that has followed them all over the country, United’s fans have been involved in large-scale fighting at clubs as far-flung as Bolton, Cardiff, Millwall and Bristol Rovers. Their reputation has, in every sense, gone before them.
Liverpool have been so concerned about trouble that the club has constructed a plated steel walkway right down the centre of the Anfield Road End – the away terrace – where the local constabulary can police them full time from their perch in the new walkway. The arrival of 6,000 Man United fans is going to be the first time the system is put to the test.
In understanding the full hysteria surrounding this fixture, we need to look at the way in which football hooliganism was transformed from an occasional and often localised phenomenon in the early 70s to a national obsession by 1975. There had always been trouble at the match. Infamous tribal gatherings such as the Harry Cripps testimonial where Millwall fans fought running battles with West Ham. Grudge matches like Brighton against Palace, Sunderland- Newcastle, Bristol against any of the South Wales teams seemed even more violent as mobs of shavenheaded skins scaled walls and fences to get at one another. “Taking� your local rivals’ end was fashionable, too – for pure bravado. Man City, for example, would turn up on Stoke City’s Boothen End knowing that, from the moment they let their presence be known, survival would depend on how quickly the Old Bill could get them out of there. It was hard to get too badly hurt in those situations.
The “taking� of an end was more about being escorted back to your own fans’ enclosure, greeting their cheers with clenched fist salutes. For some lucky souls it was also about meeting a game provincial lass for whom fucking you didn’t mean leaving an Airwair imprint on your face. Coventry, Ipswich, West Brom... tales of “willing� thugettes who’d open up their Crombies down the back of the terraces were rife, with arguments over which away girls were easiest rivalling folk tales about the hardest mobs. Football aggro was made even spicier by the ‘70s crazes for, firstly Clockwork Orange-inspired gang violence, then the Bruce Lee/David Carradinedriven interest in Kung Fu among any working-class males old enough to bruise their own knuckles with nunchucks. Even the popular TV series The Likely Lads paid lip-service to terrace violence when James Bolam’s earthy Geordie character Terry was hauled up in front of the beak for his role in a pre-season riot between Newcastle and Glasgow Rangers fans.
And the FA Cup was a rule unto itself. By virtue of the way the Cup would throw up bitter local derbies that hadn’t been played – or forgotten – in years, or David and Goliath spats where hard little teams like Carlisle or Darlington would host the streetwise hordes from the big cities, the FA Cup was always underscored by the sound of sirens as large-scale disorder broke out on the terraces and in the streets around the ground. But in general, football fans didn’t travel away from home in vast numbers, and the further the trip the less that would travel. When rucks did take place at the match they looked spectacular and they made the news. But the relegation of Manchester United to the Second Division in 1974 took our media preoccupation with football violence to new levels. There’s no question that , by the time they were relegated in 1974, United had the biggest mob in the country. When they decided to travel, they could easily muster thousands.
A whole decade before the cult for following England started to spread, Man United where, effectively, England in disguise. Attracted by the glamour of Georgie Best, the European Cup win and that elusive sense of belonging to something huge and powerful, fans started flocking to Old Trafford from all over the country. Tony Harding from Stockport said: ‘It was like a ritual inside the ground. You’d have all the London lads singing “Cockney Reds�. Then the Geordies would strike up “Geordie Reds�. Then the Brummies and so on – and when they’d all had their say, the whole of the Stretford End would applaud. It was something to be proud of back then, having that nationwide appeal.’ When they went down in 1974, the embarrassment of playing with the minnows in Division Two was overcome by a closing of ranks and a new militancy among United fans. ‘Beat them at home and beat them away,’ took on a new meaning as the European Cup Winners of six years previously faced up to away days at Leyton Orient, Oldham Athletic and Notts County.
United treated their lower league sojourn much as teams now treat the early rounds of European competition – an adventure. The chance to go to grounds you’d never visit otherwise, and wherever they went there’d be a thousand local boot boys waiting to test themselves against the infamous Red Army. Newsreels were dominated by footage of Man.United fans rampaging through town centres, smashing plate glass windows, running over car roofs, hurling bricks and genuinely causing mayhem. They’d take over the smaller grounds – lads in butchers’ coats with big wild mop-heads and tartan scarves packed up against the perimeter fence, urging each other on. They made great telly in those days, Man United. Whoever they were playing, you were guaranteed a sideshow from the newly-dubbed Red Army. Other teams began to resent their notoriety. After Norwich City beat United in the League Cup semi-final in February 1975, the news was once again taken over by footage of the Red Army smashing up the town centre, ripping their special trains to bits. There’s a famous bit of newsreel where one of the Man United boys is up on the roof of Norwich’s Main Stand, hurling masonry.
Somehow he falls through the roof, plummets a good 60-odd feet down onto the terracing below and survives. It all added to the legend of the Red Army, but it also added to their reputation as vandals rather than fighters. In a pre-Internet world, word spread more slowly. Jibes would reverberate around the jails and borstals. Lads from Leeds and Birmingham would be working on building sites in London next to Manchester, Middlesbrough and Cockney boys. And as much as the United lads would be saying: ‘How can we fight when everyone takes one look and runs?’, they were still sensitive to that perception of them as Viking invaders.
Wait till they got back up to Division One. They’d show those Yorkshire and Chelsea and Wolverhampton bigmouths what was what. In the meantime, television and newspaper coverage was creating a football violence epidemic. As Man United’s lower-league antics gained more and more coverage, so the copycat tribes started showing what they could do. Suddenly every team, however small, had its own firm. 1974-75 was the first season I was allowed to go to Anfield on my own. Too tiny for The Kop and too scared of the feral gangs in the Boy’s Pen, I went in the Anfield Road End with the pensioners and packed-sandwich crew who welcomed that extra bit of space. Look at any footage of The Kop from that era and the heads are packed so close together its just one seething, swaying mass. But the Road End’s actual terracing was a little deeper, and it was possible to see the match.
It was also possible for the gang of 100-150 lads who’d started mobbing up in the top corner to make their way across the top of the terrace at five-tothree and wade into whichever fans had made the journey. There were never really that many, anyway. But in March that year Newcastle brought about 2,000. Apart from Everton’s annual takeover of the Anny Road, I’d never seen that many away fans before. They had the middle, from the back of the terrace to about twothirds down. Liverpool won the match 1-0, but I had my back to the pitch for most of the game as the much smaller Scouse firm in the Road End fought, back and forwards with first the Newcastle mob, then the police. When the gates opened at three-quarter time, hundreds more poured in and it all kicked-off again. Match of the Day didn’t let us down, cutting away repeatedly to scenes of full-scale, mob-on-mob rucking.
A couple of weeks later, Chelsea played Crystal Palace in the Cup at Stamford Bridge. This time, Match Of The Day hardly showed the game at all, as they focused on the two firms standing off, a big circle of empty terrace between them. A Palace fan in a tweed beret runs in and donkey-drops a Chelsea lad; it’s one of the greatest screen kicks of all time, and Jimmy Hill seemingly shared that view. With his face bristling in disgust, he slows the footage down and runs it in stop-frame:
‘Let’s just see that once again as this thug runs in. Look! Look at that! He kung-fu kicks him right in the chest! This is exactly what we don’t want to see inside our grounds.’
Jimmy then looks up at the camera as though lost for words, shakes his head and goes:
‘Let’s just see it one more time...’
Television loves football violence. Sky TV’s crews seemed heartbroken when they camped out in Charleroi the night before England v Germany, and nothing happened. They know it makes news, that people are horribly fascinated. Consciously or not, Jimmy Hill was onto that back in 1975.
And back in 1975, the Liverpool v Man United grudge match finally came around. Inside the ground, the police walkway and overall anti-violence strategy worked a treat. On either side of the steel wall, the two firms made threatening gestures. (Away fans went in the South Side then. In future, that section would become the stomping ground for Liverpool’s mob). United ran at the wall after Kevin Keegan scored. The police truncheoned them back. Liverpool ran at the wall. Missiles went to and fro. But the police had it all boxed off. And they had another weapon up their sleeves afterwards – an escort like nobody anybody had ever seen before. This was another first, as police horses cordoned off Anfield Road and an almighty convoy of foot police, vans and horses set off escorting the hundred or so who’d come on the train back to Lime Street. Apart from isolated incidents and one minor battle in London Road, it was a massive anticlimax. Liverpool had a terrific firm out and United had the numbers, but it didn’t really go off. Everywhere they went that season, Man United had similar reception committees.
The clothes, the scarves, the wild, woolly hair-dos make that era of pitch invasions and brawls seem a century away. A mere two years later, Liverpool fans were patrolling the Road End in Lois jeans and Samba, the birth of a football fashion that continues to re-invent itself today. And although there have been worse periods for terrace violence – the 1984-85 season was unparalleled for sustained and major outbreaks of trouble – The Season United Went Down, 1974-75, deserves its place in British social history. That was the year that football violence went mainstream.

Switched On | Sport Features


Great little article. Very interesting.

It's always good to read about how football was pre Sky and the commercial disease.

[histon]

that is a bit long

[RedRabbit]

long but an interesting read. I read it this morning, rather good article, nice find:thumbup1:

[kiko]

Originally Posted by histon

that is a bit long

Aw, poor you.

Maybe I should draw it out in crayons for you?