Durham City ( if the weather is o.k.)
- keith.gregson
- Jan 8
- 2 min read
We are due a league match against City on January 10. A recent copy of the weekly Rugby Paper had an article bemoaning the disappearance of historic Boxing Day games. The author provided a short list of the most special of these and amongst them was the annual fixture between Sunderland RFC and Durham City RFC. As those 73ers long in the tooth will recall, some of the good and great of rugby football took part in these games. ( Please name some in our WhatsApp if you can recall any).
Looking into press archives, I have managed to find what may ( or even must) have been the very first game between the two sides. This took place in our second season and a report on it appeared in the Northern Echo of 16 October 1874. It was an away fixture for us and took place on the University’s Cricket Ground ( the one beside the Wear used by Durham County Cricket in its first season?). The actual day was Thursday 15th October. It was the first match of the season so the club had only played a handful of games since it was formed the previous Boxing Day. Our captain was the future Durham and England player Henry Kayll and the bad news was that we only had 12 players against their 15! Despite this it was noted as being an ‘excellent’ and ‘exciting’ game with Durham touching down twice but only converting the ‘try’ into a goal once. In those days if you did not convert the ‘try at goal’ you had earned, it didn’t count. Ironically the goal scorer was Paddy Junor – a legend of the early game who also turned out for us and for Houghton as well as Durham County.
According to the newspaper report, there was to be a return match on Saturday 24 October. No account of this match has turned up yet but in November 1874 we managed to defeat Houghton by 2 goals to nil and also to gain a reference in a major national sporting paper to an upcoming match away to the West of Scotland on December 19th 1874. Sadly no report yet on this one either.
Comments