Sheffield Cricket Lovers' Society Year Book 2013

34 Sheffield Cricket Lovers’ Society here in 1855; football not until 1889. The two co-existed until 1973 with one touchline running within 20 yards or so of the bowling crease. Not a recipe for a smooth outfield, particularly in the early season, as many visiting fielders would find to their cost as the ball reared up, evaded their grasp and sometimes sped on to the boundary. “I reckon the other boundary would have been about here,” says Robert, sitting down under one of Fatty Foulkes’s tree-trunk legs. And the pavilion? “That was out on the right hand side of what’s now the car park.” It was “spacious and well-equipped,” according to Kilburn, “though not very comfortable for watching the play. The home team have a very small balcony; the visitors have no balcony at all and must watch through glass, which is never very satisfactory.” Particularly, one imagines, if the windows were smeared with smoky residue. There’s not a trace of the pavilion today. Nor of the grounds man’s house which was roughly where two statues stand: one to Derek Dooley, the other to Joe Shaw. Both were former footballers, needless to say. Robert is a lover of cricket and football in season. So why did he push so hard to ensure that cricket would be banished from the Lane? “Because we had a three-sided football ground and I couldn’t see United being successful as long as that remained the case. There was a much more attractive cricket ground at Abbeydale Park, Sheffield Collegiate’s home turf, and Yorkshire went on to play there from 1974 until 1996.“ Sheffield United CC, the club occupying Bramall Lane for the rest of the summer, moved out to Dore, the city’s wealthiest suburb. It was back in 1971 that shareholders voted narrowly to accept the Jackson proposal on a four-sided football ground. United were back in the old first division and doing well. But, as with any gathering of Yorkshire folk, there was no outbreak of universal harmony. “One bloke told me: ‘Tha’s got rid of cricket at Bramall Lane and I’m going to put a curse on the football team. ‘ I thought he was joking, but we’ve never achieved too much since.” Robert smiles wanly and leads the way round the front of the ground and in through an unlocked side gate. Red plastic seating encircles the pitch. Much of it would have been terracing at one time. Opposite the pavilion end was a long football stand raised above concrete terracing. “Here the seating was slightly more comfortable than in the pavilion enclosure,” according to Kilburn, “but the cricket was only distantly in view and a sense of isolation was discouragingly strong.” As football gave way to the summer game, the Spion Kop was known as the Grinders’ Stand after the men who ground steel to make Sheffield cutlery. Sometimes they would go to a day’s cricket after working a night shift in conditions that would make many of us long for nothing more than several pints of water (or Richdale’s rich ales) and a long lie down. Rudimentary wooden benches were provided, but Robert recalls that many of them preferred simply