That Sheffield Connection

Weather permitting, this month will see another encounter in the world’s oldest football derby. Hallam FC will take on Sheffield FC in the quarter-final of the the Sheffield & Hallamshire Senior Cup. The match will take place at Hallam’s home - Sandygate - the world’s oldest football ground – where they have played ever since forming in 1860. Sheffield FC – emerging from a local cricket club - are the world’s oldest football club, forming in 1857.

The first derby match took place 165 years ago and was played, according to a report from Sheffield FC, "in the presence of a large number of spectators,” and "was conducted with good temper and in a friendly spirit.” Sheffield won 2.0. It is known as ‘The Rules Derby’ after the code of football rules known as ‘The Sheffield Rules’ which were devised in 1858 and spread beyond the Sheffield city boundaries to other clubs and associations in the North and Midlands of England, making them one of the most popular forms of football during the 1860s and 1870s. The Rules were unified with London (Football Association) Rules in April 1877 enabling the FA Cup to be played as a national competition.

Indeed, on Boxing Day 1877 representatives from the Sheffield area had travelled to Leeds to try to encourage the locals to take up or follow association football. Led by Fred Sanderson, President of the Sheffield Football Association, two teams from Sheffield played out an exhibition match at Holbeck Recreation Ground. This is considered to be the first association football match ever to be played in Leeds.

Sheffield FC currently play in the eighth tier of the English football league system, while Hallam FC play in the ninth. Sheffield currently has two professional clubs in the English Football League of course – both of them in the Championship and thus promotion rivals –while we remain the largest one-city club in England, and arguably the fourth biggest in Europe behind Naples, Marseille and Amsterdam (after FC Amsterdam were disbanded in 1982).

Without doubt it is Sheffield United we are more focused on at the moment, as the typically tight second-tier promotion race pitches us against each other, as it did in 2019, 2006 and, perhaps most memorably, 1990.

However, Sheffield Wednesday – also formed out of a cricket club, in 1867 – know all about glory. They’ve won the league title four times, compared to our three. They have also experienced the ignominy of falling all the way down to the third tier, as we did, and almost the fourth. Our own, still sadly missed, Jack Charlton took the Owls back to the Second Division in 1980 before handing the reins over to Howard Wilkinson. He promptly took the club back into the top-flight in 1984, after an absence of 14 years. Unfortunately – and disastrously for them with the benefit of hindsight – despite that promotion, a fifth-place finish and an FA Cup semi-final, the club’s unambitious directors were disinclined to invest more money into his team.

Howard therefore joined Leeds as manager in October 1988 where he was most certainly backed. Players he had either spotted, bought or coached at Wednesday joined the Wilkinson revolution at Leeds. Among others Carl Shutt, Mel Sterland, David Wetherall and Jon Newsome all have their places in our history, as does Lee Chapman who secured that promotion for us at Bournemouth, leaving the Blades in second place.

Perhaps the most spectacular and far-reaching piece of transfer business in this regard was when Howard hijacked a deal that had been agreed to take 32-year-old Scottish midfielder Gordon Strachan from Manchester United to Wednesday. Matching the £200,000 offer, he persuaded Strachan to drop down a division and join Leeds instead, making him not just his midfield fulcrum, but also his captain. We may still have doubts about the way the whole Cantona affair was conducted, but Strachan to Leeds was priceless.

Howard’s return trip to Sheffield Wednesday on 12 January 1992 stays long in the memory. Leeds simply annihilated the opposition in a 6.1 win, with Lee Chapman scoring a hat-trick. It was probably Leeds’s best away win in the league since September 1930 when they won at Blackpool 7.3. Howard remains the last Englishmen to win the top-flight title in this country and, despite their fine football heritage, it seems more likely that Leeds United will be league champions again before any team from Sheffield.