The sport that Sheffield United's Bramall Lane was first used for - It's not football | OneFootball

Sheffield United have been playing at Bramall Lane since 1889, but it wasn't originally a football ground, and it was a very unusual one for decades.

Sheffield United have been playing at Bramall Lane since 1889, but its history goes back further than that, and for many decades that origin story made it one of Britain's most unusual grounds.

The origin stories of Britain's football clubs are many and varied, but one of the most unusual comes when a club is formed to fill an existing stadium. It happened in 1905, with the formation of Chelsea to fill the vacant Stamford Bridge, but this wasn't the first case of it happening. It also happened in the city which is now widely credited as "The Home of Football", with the formation of Sheffield United.

When football started to codify in the 1850s, the dominant sport in this country was cricket. One of the first cities to truly adopt this new game was Sheffield, which gave birth to the world's oldest football clubs, Sheffield FC and Hallam FC, and which had its own version of the rules which would later be incorporated into the broader laws of the game.

The professional game, however, wasn't quite as quick to develop in the city. Sheffield FC and Hallam FC remained amateur. The Wednesday FC were formed in 1867, but when the Football League was formed in 1888 there were, surprisingly, no representatives from the city among the 12 invited to be its founder members.

Sheffield United were formed in order to utilise Bramall Lane

The formation of Sheffield United came in 1889, a year after the formation of the Football League. Bramall Lane was first opened in 1855 as a cricket ground. Indeed, one of its first tenants was The Wednesday Cricket Club, who would form the club that would become known as Sheffield Wednesday just over a decade later.

It was used for the first time for football in 1862, for a charity match between Sheffield FC and Hallam FC, but when professionalism was permitted by the FA in 1885 for the first time, The Wednesday - who had used Bramall Lane on a semi-permanent basis for football since 1880 and were by this time the dominant club in the city - opted to build a ground of their own nearby rather than occupy the existing ground.

The ultimate catalyst for the decision to form a new club was an FA Cup semi-final held there in March 1889 between Preston North End and West Bromwich Albion, which was watched by a crowd of over 22,000. Just six days after this match, a decision was taken to form a new football club to utilise the facility for football purposes.

Bramall Lane had already been used for other high-profile matches. The first England vs Scotland game to be played outside London or Glasgow was played there in 1883, while the first recorded game to be played under floodlights in this country - an exhibition match - had come five years earlier, in 1878. The new club, Sheffield United, was voted into the Football League upon its expansion to two divisions in 1892, while The Wednesday were at the same time voted into the First Division.

Although Sheffield United were formed to utilise Bramall Lane, county cricket didn't end there, and this led to the ground being one of the most unusual-looking in the Football League for many decades to come. Cricket pitches are, of course, far, far bigger than football pitches, so Bramall Lane remained a three-sided ground, by the 20th century one of only two in the Football League alongside Northampton Town's County Ground, which was also shaped that way because of a cricket pitch.

By the start of the 1960s, it was evident that these two bedfellows couldn't really live alongside each other anymore. The club's 1962 accounts showed that revenue from the football club over the previous 12 months had been £127,902 while cricket had brought in just £2,927. In addition to that, the terracing of the football ground was unsuitable for watching cricket, which might require sitting in one spot for many hours at a time.

The axe fell in 1971 when, having just won promotion back to the Football League's First Division, the club gave Yorkshire CCC two years' notice of eviction. The final county cricket match to be held there was on the 7th August 1973, and work started almost immediately on a new South Stand, which opened two years later.

The stand cost £750,000 to build, but Sheffield United were relegated at the end of the 1975-76 season, the first after it opened, and by 1981 they'd been relegated to the Fourth Division, before fighting their way back to the top flight by the start of the following decade. The ground was converted to an all-seater in the early 1990s, and it remains to this day the third-oldest ground in the world.

The links between football and cricket go back as far as the game of football itself. Numerous football clubs were formed so that cricketers had a game to play during the winter. But in Sheffield, the links are closer than in most cities. Sheffield United exist because of a need to turn Bramall Lane into the 19th century equivalent to a multi-purpose venue, and they maintained that clear link for over eighty years. Blades fans will be glad that those 19th administrators had the foresight that they did.