Fifty years ago, Sheffield United ended their ground’s strange use for cricket despite most shareholders voting for it to remain
As Britain reels from the impact of one advisory referendum, perhaps it is a decent time to remember another, of which the result – unlike the more famous and recent example of June 2016 – was promptly and most emphatically ignored by those in a position of power.
In the winter of 1970-71 Sheffield United asked their 450 shareholders to tell them whether they wanted to see Yorkshire continue to play a few games of county cricket each year at their original home, Bramall Lane – “simply [to] give the board an idea of the temperature among the shareholders”, as the chairman Richard Wragg put it. And it was 50 years ago today that the result was announced, with the majority of shareholders happy to see cricket remain.
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