Where can I buy a pair of your rose tinted specs?
For one thing the Kippax terracing was too shallow and hard to see anything if stuck behind a couple of 6 foot guys so many would not have actually seen 93.20. The atmosphere was only good at certain games and rarely in the main stand.
Maine Road was primitive in the 1960's when "improvements" started. It was a dump by the time we left. Keep the good memories though.
100% agreement from me. The sightlines in the Kippax were bad unless you were over six foot tall. The only time I regularly went in the Kippax apart from my first few matches was when the Scoreboard end was being re-built as the North Stand. I moved to the North Stand once it had been opened and got my first season ticket when the seats were installed.
I had moved away from Manchester before Swales managed to destroy the stadium. I recall attending a League Cup tie against Chelsea in 1993 when I was in Manchester on business. I made the mistake of queuing at the Kippax and did not get into the ground until 25 minutes after the kick-off because of congestion. The crowd was 16,713 (or so Mr Swales informed everyone).
Being away and making only fleeting visits to Maine Road, I was spared the fiasco of the 'downsizing' of the stadium under Swales. When I started to go to Maine Road in 1963, the capacity was 64,000. By the time I moved away in 1977 it had been reduced to 52,600 partially due to seating in the North Stand.
By 1993 the Umbro Stand had replaced the Platt Lane End (with capacity falling from 9,702 to 4,548) dropping the capacity to 39,359. Two years later the Kippax was demolished (original capacity 26,155 reduced to 9,882) leaving Maine Road to 31,147. After shoehorning some open-air seats in the Gene Kelly the capacity finally ended up at 31,150.
It's not that the new Kippax Stand was small. It was massive, the highest in the country at the time?. It just had very few seats in it. I think the third tier had two rows of seats. This botched redevelopment uprocess made the move inevitable, particularly with the expanding fanbase.
The other problem with Maine Road was its location made transport problematical.It is some way from a railway station (Oxford Road?) and not on any tram route and not ideal for car parking. I lost count of the time I have a car broken into, or car radio nicked, or vandalised.
