Sheffield United - Monday 2nd January 2012

Last updated : 02 January 2012 By Tim Graham

These days as far as groundsharing is concerned you associate rugby clubs, of both the league and union code, with football teams, but our visitors today were one club who shared a ground with the sport of cricket for a long time. The bare bones being that the first cricket fixture took place at Bramall Lane in 1855 and the final one was played there in 1973, while a football match was first contested there in 1862, and in 1889 Sheffield United Football Club began in what has now been their home for a remarkable 122 years.

It was the formation of Sheffield United Cricket Club in 1854 that led to the leasing of the Bramall Lane land from the Duke of Norfolk, with the first cricket match being played there in April 1855, while a team representing Yorkshire held their first county fixture at the Lane in August of that year, the White Rose side losing heavily to Sussex by an innings and 117 runs.  The modern day Yorkshire County Cricket Club itself not being formed until 1863, with Bramall Lane being their headquarters for 30 years until they relocated to Headingley.

By that time though the first football match had been played at Bramall Lane 12 months earlier, between Sheffield FC (noted to be the oldest football club in the world) and Hallam FC, the game being played to raise money for the Lancashire Distress Fund, which would no doubt be a shocker for modern day Yorkshire cricket fans. The fund set up to due to the Lancashire Cotton Famine that took place between 1861 and 1865, the situation mainly caused by the lack of cotton coming from over the pond with the American Civil War on the go at the time.

The most important football games in the area were played at the Lane in those early days, with The Wednesday, themselves the offshoot of a cricket club, more often than not playing there until they moved to a purpose built Olive Grove ground in 1887. While nine years earlier in 1878 what was reputedly the world's first floodlit football match was played at the Lane between two Sheffield representative sides in front of an estimated 20,000 fans who watched on thanks to four wooden towers erected with lamps powered by dynamos.

 

Bramall Lane

 

With England then playing Scotland, at football, at Bramall Lane in 1883, and then most importantly, Preston facing West Brom in an 1889 FA Cup semi-final the idea came to form and run Sheffield United Football Club at the venue as well. The head of Mr Charles Stokes, then a junior member of the ground committee, no doubt being turned by the bumper gate receipts of £574 from the North End v Baggies game, with his suggestion for a football club then going to Sir Charles Clegg, who at the time was President of the Football Association and President of Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United Cricket Club.

So, from August 1889, that was then football on the go full-time at the Lane but with cricket also carrying on there is one for you to stick in the quiz question memory bank as a Test Match between England and Australia took place at the ground in 1902. That meaning that, when an FA Cup Final replay took place there in 1912 between Barnsley and West Brom, Bramall Lane became one of only two grounds that to this day have hosted both an FA Cup Final and a Test Match, that claim to fame shared with what was originally the Kennington Oval, and is now the Kia Oval.

It wasn’t then until the late 1960s that the first big cracks began to appear in the cricket/football relationship with Yorkshire cricket on the decline and pressure coming on the football club to create a proper four-sided stadium worthy of what was then a First Division Blades side. And so in 1971 the decision came that cricket would end at Bramall Lane in two years time, with the last match played there being, fittingly, a Roses encounter in August 1973, Lancashire’s Jack Simmons bowling the last cricket ball at the ground to Yorkshire’s Colin Johnson as the game petered out into a draw.

By 1975 a cantilever stand across the cricket square, seating 7,746 people had been built and opened at Bramall Lane, with the Victorian pavilion remaining there until 1982, when it was pulled down to make way for a car park. 118 years of cricket played at the ground therefore becoming nothing more than a distant memory from that point onwards at a venue where Yorkshire County Cricket Club had staged 391 first class games over time.