Sheffield Cricket Lovers' Society Year Book 2013

33 Bramall Lane, Sheffield, is a shrine to football. There is hardly anything to indicate that fewer than 40 years summers ago the home of Sheffield United FC was also a celebrated cricket ground. Apart, that is, from a plaque attached to one of the railings in the car park pointing out that a test match between England and Australia was played here in 1902. Australia would come back on many more occasions as the century unfolded, but their opponents would be Yorkshire not England. They would play in front of large crowds, both voluble and knowledgeable, particularly before and just after the Second World War. Those were the days before Headingley had established itself as the official county headquarters. Sheffield rather than Leeds was where a peripatetic Yorkshire side felt most at home – certainly more at home than their opponents. Between 1919 and the final game in 1973, they played 163 championship matches at “the Lane” and lost only 18. It was a place of “sharp wit and shrewd comment”, as JM Kilburn of the Yorkshire Post put it. Kilburn was the Cardus of the east side of the Pennines. Born in Sheffield in 1909, he accepted Bramall Lane for what it was when he was growing up. Only gradually did he become aware of why visitors (particularly southern ones) might be less than enthusiastic about playing cricket in “a pit of concrete and steel” with “not a tree to be seen”. In Homes of Cricket, written with Norman Yardley in 1952, he describes not only the view from the pavilion but also the proximity of encircling industry: “The clatter of passing tramcars and the scream of a saw-mill and factory hooters make a background of noise to the cricket, and a brewery chimney periodically pours smoke and soot into the air. An old story insists that the workmen in the brewery follow Yorkshire’s fortunes with care, and stoke up most vigorously when Yorkshire’s opponents are batting.” The brewery was Richdales [slogan: “Richdales make rich ales”] and is long gone. So, too, are the smoky skies and any sense that great cricketing deeds were once performed beneath them. I am sitting in Bramall Lane’s reception, under a photograph of the dauntingly corpulent former Sheffield United goalkeeper William “Fatty” Foulkes (1874-1916), waiting to meet the man who did more than anyone else to bring about an end to cricket on this ground. Robert Jackson is a spry octogenarian and a top crown green bowls player. He was once sports editor of Radio Sheffield and a long-time shareholder in Sheffield United Cricket and Football Club. Note which sport came first. Cricket was first played Bramall Lane Chris Arnot Sheffield Cricket Lovers’ Society