Yorkshire’s role in setting English football on its way to dominate world sport is traced in a new book reviewed by Eric Brown…

BY ERIC BROWN
Think of Yorkshire and what comes to mind?
The spectacular Dales perhaps, tea, beer, puddings, Last of the Summer Wine, Len Hutton, Freddie Trueman, Geoffrey Boycott, The Yorkshire Post, ferrets, York Minster, cloth caps… the list of county symbols is endless.
Yet Yorkshire’s role as the cradle of English football often goes unnoticed outside the county.
Maybe a new book by former broadcaster and journalist Steve Tongue will act as a timely reminder that Yorkshire gave birth to English club football now dominated by the Premier League.
A concept where 20 English clubs compete for position in a highly lucrative league each week to earn places in inflated European competitions must have been far from the minds of cricketers who gathered in a Sheffield house in October 1857 to discuss plans for filling winter months with sporting activity.
Sheffield solicitor Nathaniel Creswick and his wine merchant friend William Prest, captain of Sheffield Cricket Club, were prime movers in calling the meeting at the home of teenager Harry Chambers.
By the end of the year, Creswick wrote in his diary: “I have established a football club to which most of young Sheffield can come and have a kick.”
And so England’s first football club was founded. But it was to be 31 years before the Football League began, so who could Sheffield FC play?
After all, if you are the first and only club, the opposition must be limited.
Creswick solved the problem by organising matches involving Sheffield members whose surnames began with letters A to L against those beginning with M to Z.
Other teams comprised married men against bachelors. A few soldiers’ teams also provided opposition while Sheffield waited patiently for other independent clubs to emerge.
Sheffield eventually found a pitch on East Bank Road half a mile from Bramall Lane, and officials turned their attention to the rules. They were determined to ban handling the ball, a move which alienated many members who promptly left to support rugby.
Fights during matches were common but Sheffield, and Yorkshire, had played a vital part in kicking off what became the world’s dominant sport.
It soon established a vocabulary. The first football match report appeared in December 1860 when Sheffield beat soldiers of the 58th Regiment by 10 “rouges” to five.
Rouges were used to settle drawn matches and were awarded to a team getting the ball within 12 feet of the narrow goal but not between the posts.
One can only sympathise with any under-pressure official charged with counting these to the satisfaction of both teams. VAR definitely required!
So Yorkshire sowed the seeds and profited from the growth of football. Two major professional clubs later emerged in Sheffield, joined by Barnsley, Leeds, Hull, Rotherham, Bradford (two clubs), Doncaster, Huddersfield and Harrogate.
This book is the story of their triumphs, tribulations and the disasters that befell the county at Hillsborough and Valley Parade.

Personalities loom large from Herbert Chapman and his triple League winners at Huddersfield to Don Revie’s controversial Leeds plus John Charles, Brian Clough and Jack Charlton.
There’s something of interest not only to Yorkshire football fans but to all football followers everywhere in Steve Tongue’s excellent history.
This is the fourth book in his superb Turf Wars series. I haven’t seen the Lancashire and West Midlands books but this latest superb offering matches the quality in the inaugural London version published in 2016.
‘Yorkshire Turf Wars, A Football History’ by Steve Tongue is published by Pitch, price £14.99.
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