Sheffield Wednesday Football Club has its origins on this day (4th Sept) in 1867 and it became the third oldest professional football club in England, when a meeting of local cricketers at the Adelphi Hotel, Sheffield, decided that they wanted to keep fit during the winter. The cricket club was first called the Darnall Club named from their first pitch and then the Wednesday Cricket Club. Below is The Darnall Cricket ground in the 1820s. They later went to Hyde Park in the city.
Their football club flourished and was known as Wednesday FC until 1929.
Wednesday was well known as "half day" when I were a lad, with shops and some businesses closing at lunch time, especially those who opened on Saturday afternoons. My local area in Surrey had a Wednesday Football League and a Cricket League.
Wednesday from 1855 played at Olive Grove and Bramall Lane until 1899 when they moved to Hillsborough. The two clubs split in 1882 and the Wednesday Cricket Club ceased in 1925.
The club played its first competitive game on February 1st 1868 in the Cromwell Cup, a local competition in Sheffield.
Below are further links between the two sports.
https://www.footballsite.co.uk/DYK/DYK22-Cricket.htm
While that was going on, Chelsea FC was elected to the Football League without having kicked a ball in anger or playing a match of any kind at home. The league debut was at Stockport County on September 2nd, ending in a 0-1 defeat. Two days later they met Liverpool in a friendly at Stamford Bridge and won 4-0. Almost a century later, the two clubs met at the same venue in the Champions League Semi-Final.
As if that wasn't enough, Fulham selected George Best for the first time at Craven Cottage, following his previous "retirement" and over 21,000 turned up to watch them play Bristol Rovers. Rodney Marsh and Bobby Moore might have been other attractions. Best scored after 71 seconds!
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