It all started in 1820, when six local tradesmen in Sheffield decided to use a work-free afternoon to play cricket… and Sheffield Wednesday Football Club was born.
How the football club got their name seems like a well-worn pub quiz question but the first Wednesday of June 2020 brings the 200th anniversary of the founding of The Wednesday Cricket Club.
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When cutlers and silversmiths William Stratford, John Southren, Tom Lindley, William Woolhouse, George Dawson and George Hardisty gathered 200 years ago to start a cricket team to play on Wednesday afternoons — part of a midweek half-day working tradition that continued in Sheffield for decades afterwards — they probably didn’t envisage the team morphing into a football club that has won the title four times, three FA Cups and a League Cup. They could scarcely have predicted the spread and popularity of football across the nation or what Wednesday would become in a sporting context.
“At that time in Sheffield, there were loads of cricket clubs that were named after days of the week, so we weren’t actually unique at that time — there was a Thursday Cricket Club and a Friday Cricket Club,” says Sean Fenelon, secretary of The Wednesday Cricket Club. “At that point, cricket was the number one sport in England, without a shadow of a doubt.”
Marking the occasion of the cricket club’s founding and its relationship to the football club has been down to the efforts of Fenelon, who had arranged a charity match against a Yorkshire County Cricket XI as well as limited-edition anniversary merchandise for fans to buy from Wednesday’s club megastore at Hillsborough. All plans for the charity game and merchandise sales have been placed on hold as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Championship football has, at least, got a return date of June 20 for Wednesday fans to look forward to, even if the matches will take place behind closed doors, but 2021 looks like the next chance the cricket club will have to don their whites as there is only a slim chance of amateur cricket returning this summer.
“It’s a bit frustrating,” Fenelon says. “We’d done deals for the first-ever Adidas Wednesday shirt, a 200th-anniversary shirt. We were going to produce 200 of each shirt, training tops, ties and celebratory pin badges. All that would have been up and running now. It’s a really nice piece of kit but the manufacturers aren’t manufacturing.”
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Starting in 1820, the Wednesday played games at several cricket grounds in the city and gradually grew in popularity. By 1831, they were playing on a regular fortnightly basis and travelling out to Chesterfield and Ripon for matches. Newspaper reports from the time show that Sheffield often played rival teams as a Yorkshire representative side, long before the official county cricket team was founded in 1863. Nearly 20,000 fans turned out to watch The Wednesday in action in 1833 as star batsman Tom Marsden represented the North in a match against a team featuring the great southern cricketer of the time, Fuller Pilch.
In 1867, the club decided its players needed to stay fit throughout the winter months and so, on September 4, after a meeting at the Adelphi Hotel in the city centre, decided to form a football team too. Players featured for both the cricket and football teams until the late 19th century as The Wednesday Football Club grew in stature, winning the 1896 FA Cup and eventually changing their name to become Sheffield Wednesday FC in 1929.
The cricket club disbanded in 1924, owing to financial difficulties, but was brought back in 2011 by a group of cricket-loving Wednesday supporters.
“Most Wednesday fans, even now, don’t realise that it has been brought back into existence,” says Fenelon. “The reformation was at the same time as it looked like the football club was really in trouble and one of the basic reasons for reforming the cricket club was to protect the name of Wednesday as an entity as much as anything else. It was literally a group of Sheffield Wednesday supporters who like cricket — four of five of us from different walks of life — and only one player, really.”
After spreading the word online, The Wednesday soon picked up enough players and entered the local Sheffield Alliance Midweek League which, naturally, played on Wednesday evenings.
The club’s first game since the inter-war period took place on May 1, 2011, and it has grown to also include a Sunday team, which was due to play its first season of top-flight cricket in Sheffield this summer after winning promotion in 2019. Not all of The Wednesday’s players are fans of the football club: Sheffield United fans are welcome — the club’s leading run-scorer, Ash Naseby, supports Wednesday’s arch rivals.
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Like everything else being put on hold this year, 2021 is now the target for the cricket club to kick off their top-flight season.
Unlike their predecessors who represented Wednesday at both sports, though, the cricket XI and the football XI will focus on their own games in the hope of bringing silverware back to the blue and white half of the city.
(Top photo: Adam Fradgley – AMA/West Bromwich Albion FC via Getty Images)
