|
|
A History of Football in
Derby
Derby County Football Club is a club steeped in history and tradition. Formed as an off-shoot of Derbyshire County Cricket Club, Derby County were among the 12 founder members of the Football League when it was initiated in 1888. Ever since the early days of British football, Derby County - known as 'The Rams' - have enjoyed a reputation for playing entertaining football, and Derby is widely regarded as a 'football city'.
However, the Baseball Ground was not built to be the home of a football club. In fact, when the Baseball Ground was built Derby had no organised football team but with Derby's obsession with the game of football, it seemed inevitable that a team would have to be formed.
1890 Team
In the 19th century all of Derby's parks provided some form of recreational exercise, such as tennis, bowls and rowing, but what really interested the working class in Derby was FOOTBALL. Not just any football game, but the traditional Shrovetide football match; a chaotic and exuberant game which involved the whole town, with goals at Nuns Mill in the north and the Gallows Balk in the south of the town, and in which much of the action took place in the Derwent river or Markeaton brook. Nominally the players came from All Saints' and St Peter's parishes, but in practice the game was a free for all with as many as 1,000 players. A Frenchman who observed the match in 1829 wrote in horror, 'if Englishmen call this play, it would be impossible to say what they call fighting'.
The game started at 2 o'clock when the pancake bells were rung. A 19th century pamphlet gives the following rhyme which was chanted as the bells rang out:
Pancakes and fritters
Say All Saints and St Peters
When will the ball come?
Say the bells of St Alkmun's;
At two they will throw
Says St Werabo
O! very well
Says little St Michael!
The ball, which was made of leather stuffed with cork shavings, was thrown to the assembled players in the market place. Players were usually stripped to the waist and every effort was made by fair means or foul to score a goal. Cheating was rife, and on one occasion the ball was unstuffed and it's components smuggled through the crowd under a woman's dress to be reassembled by the rival's goal. When a goal was scored the bells of the jubilant parish rang out.
For two days each year on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday the town was taken over by this melee, with loss of trade, damage to property and an increase in petty crime. Such was the disruption to the life of the town, the threat to public order and individual morals that in 1845 the town council decided to ban the match once and for all. It offered instead a sports day with prizes, to be held on The Holmes. Competitions such as jumping matches, blindfold foot races and sack races for which each participant was to bring his own sack were to be held, as well as other entertainments. On Ash Wednesday boys could take part in a plum pudding and treacle eating match or swarm up a greasy pole to bring down a joint of meat.
The council warned that the prizes would not be awarded if any football was played on the streets during the sports days and as a substitute it organised a knock-out football competition for local teams with prizes of £10 for the winners. The aim of the sports was to 'promote a social and kindly feeling... to give a fair field for manly exercise and innocent relations free from all immorality and vicious excitement'. It was felt that much of the immorality and vicious excitement was caused by the demon drink, so liqueur was banned from The Holmes, and anyone caught spoiling the entertainment was to be held up to public ridicule and tossed up in a blanket.
In the event many townsfolk ignored the official sports and tried to hold the football match in the streets as usual. They were stopped by the borough police augmented from outside, with the military on standby. By the following Shrove Tuesday the council had passed a bylaw forbidding the match, and attempts to revive it during the 19th century were not successful (and incidentally, the bylaw still stands to this day. It is still technically illegal for football to be played in the streets of Derby at Shrovetide - all little boys beware!)
Shrovetide football matches were traditional all over the country, and probably dated back to pagan times. Usually the teams were representatives of ancient rivalries from different areas of a town, and the ball used was sometimes an inflated bladder, but could also be a barrel or the carcass of an animal thrown into the crowd by a local dignitary. Ashbourne in Derbyshire is one of the few places where the Shrovetide football match still takes place.
Participation in football as an organised game continued in Derby, with numerous works, churches and society teams playing each other. But it was with the development of Derby County Cricket Club and the Derby County Football Club that we see the emergence of commercialised spectator sport.
When Francis Ley laid out a sports ground for employees of his foundry in the 1880s, he could not have imagined that one day part of it would be the site of one of football's greatest theatres.
The
Baseball Ground
The Ley's baseball ground was part of a 12-acre area which included cricket and football pitches and it was almost certainly Ley's pride and joy.
The local industrialist, who was subsequently knighted, came back from a trip to the United States in 1889 and introduced baseball to Britain. The Derby club, with the legendary Steve Bloomer at second base, won the English Cup in 1897.
The Derby County Football Club started in 1884 as a means to keep the county cricketers fit during the winter. By that date a half-holiday on Saturday was normal for most workers, and with a pool of people wanting something to do on a Saturday afternoon there was always a good audience for the county football club's matches. At this point someone realised that if a special ground were reserved for the matches an admission fee could be charged and a profit made. The first ground was next to the cricket ground in Nottingham Road. However, Derby Recreation Committee, which leased the County Ground and Racecourse from Derby Corporation, was making life difficult. On Easter Monday 1895, Derby County had been unable to fulfil an attractive fixture against the Corinthians because of racing later that week.
In April 1895, a packed meeting at the Derwent Hotel heard the club committee unanimously recommend a move to the Baseball Ground where the Rams had occasionally played.
Ley had already spent £7,000 improving the Baseball Ground and was prepared to finance a further £500-worth of work which included adding six yards to the Railway Side, and transferring stands from the County Ground to increase the capacity from 4,000 to 20,000.
On
September 14, 1895, 10,000 people saw Steve
Bloomer score both
goals in the Rams' 2-0 win over Sunderland at the Baseball Ground. It
was the first match there since it had become the club's new home and
fears that attendances would not be maintained were
banished.
However, the Baseball Ground didn't become the property of Derby County Football Club until July 4, 1924, when it was finally purchased from Ley for £10,000.
The famous tale of the gypsies' curse - the Rams were alleged to have moved them off the site and been cursed never to win a major trophy - might be true, although some gypsies appear to have a cordial relationship with the club and one, named Old Mallender, cut the grass and rolled the pitch.
The
Rams have reached 4 FA Cup finals, but won the famous Cup only once
in 1946, with a team which included great names such as Raich Carter,
Peter Doherty and Jackie Stamps.
Derby became firmly established as one of England's premier clubs in the 1970s, winning the League Championship twice. After gaining promotion under Brian Clough, the Rams took the top flight by storm and won their first Championship in 1971/72.
With
the charismatic Clough as manager, Derby reached the European Cup
semi-finals in 1972 , and even when Clough left the club in
controversial circumstances, maintained their status under former
captain Dave Mackay, who guided the Rams to another League
Championship in 1974/75.
An FA Cup semi-final defeat in 1976 marked the start of a steep decline. Mackay departed amid a flawed bid to bring back Clough, Tommy Docherty came in and immediately sold many established stars such as Kevin Hector and Archie Gemmill, bringing in below-average replacements and the club spent its centenary season in the early 80s playing in the old Third Division for the first time since the fifties.
Kevin Hector
Arthur Cox was appointed manager with another ex-skipper Roy McFarland as his assistant and, under their guidance, the Rams were promoted into the old First Division in successive seasons.
Success appeared to be just around the corner again with great players like Peter Shilton, Mark Wright and Dean Saunders at the club, but financial restrictions placed by former chairman Robert Maxwell caused the team to wither and, after four years in the top flight, Derby were relegated in 1991.
A change of ownership from the Maxwell family to a board of local businessmen meant that Wright and Saunders had to be sold to Liverpool for a combined fee of £5.1million, but in November 1991 Lionel Pickering, a Derbyshire millionaire, bought a controlling interest in the Club and immediately £11million was invested in bringing new young talent.
However, even with that outlay in the transfer market, promotion continued to elude the Rams, although only defeat at the hands of Leicester City in the 1993-94 promotion play-off final at Wembley Stadium prevented Derby taking their place in the FA Premiership.
Cox
was succeeded in the hot seat by McFarland, and at the start of the
1995/96 season the Rams appointed one of football's most experienced
managers, Jim Smith. With some canny dealing in the transfer market,
Smith built a side which went a record 20 league games unbeaten in
mid-season. And he introduced a new crowd hero in Croatian
international defender Igor Stimac -the £1.57 Smith paid Hajduk
Split for his services was the second highest transfer outlay by the
Rams.
The 1995-96 season was almost as exciting off the pitch as on, for Derby's directors announced plans to move to a brand new 30,000-seater stadium on Derby's Pride park in August 1997. On the field, the Rams clinched promotion to the FA Premier League for the first time with a thrilling last home game victory over Crystal Palace assuring them runners-up spot in the Endsleigh First Division.
Pride Park Stadium
In July 1997 Derby County Football Club moved to their new purpose built stadium on Pride Park. The new stadium is very impressive and can be viewed in all it's splendour from the A52 road which runs nearby. The Baseball Ground, is still being retained by the club for the time being (and because maybe nostalgia makes Derby County reluctant to part with it).
Pride
Park Stadium was officially opened by Her Majesty the Queen and the
Duke of Edinburgh. The Rams played their first game against European
stars Sampdoria.
Smith ensured continued progress, bringing in a number of European and South American stars, and his cosmopolitan squad clinched 10th place in the world's toughest league in the first season at Pride Park Stadium, then 8th in 1998/99.
By the start of the millennium campaign, by which time Jim Smith had paid a new club record £3-million for the services of Crewe Alexandra's Seth Johnson, the capacity at Pride Park had increased to more than 33,000 and one of the country's best new stadiums had been placed on the category A list for England's 2006 World Cup campaign.
