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Before Manchester City moved into their first permanent home in 1887, the club played at a short series of grounds which ranged from established cricket venues to bumpy fields with no stands or boundaries nor history of sporting usage. Having only been founded originally as a philanthropic endeavour to encourage impressionable youths to commit to wholesome activities rather than falling to the local adolescent culture of alcohol and violence - and with the sport of football barely 15 years from the writing of its own rulebook - the club had no immediate option of using or constructing a stadium, and thus most of their first locations were nothing more than painted lines and goalposts. As the club itself reformed and changed its name twice during the period of 1880 to 1887, so too its choice of locations were a series of low-cost, short-term solutions as and when their current location became untenable. It was not until 1887 - when City moved to their sixth pitch in only eight years - that they would have the money, ambition, reputation and stability to construct themselves a more permanent base of operations, at the stadium named Hyde Road. =="Near Clowes Street" (1880–81)== City's very first recorded game was played on 13 November 1880 under the guise of St Mark's (West Gorton). The name represented their recent founding as a church youth social group and their home district in an era when football was just beginning to boom in popularity; the proliferation of local amateur teams led to the practice of appending home locations onto teams' names to avoid confusion. Although the 13 November game is regarded by many as the first game in City's history, a lack of evidence means that it is possible that other games were played before this date.〔 St Mark's' first (recorded) opponents were another church team representing the Baptist church in Macclesfield, with the score finishing 2–1 to the visitors. The match is also particularly notable as both teams fielded 12 players. Additionally, each fielded a 13th player as "umpire", the rules of football dictating then that each team nominate an umpire to command half of the pitch, holding a flag which he raised if he agreed with any player protest, the referee standing on the touchline as final arbiter and timekeeper. As befitted football pitches of the time, the goalposts were flimsy wooden posts with the crossbar being simply a tape tied between the posts.〔 The location chosen for the football team's first games was essentially an area of unused waste land known in records to be "near Clowes Street", and picked as it was also the location that the St Mark's cricket teams played. Many players played both sports for the church and, alternated as the seasonal weather dictated. The land had also been the frequent site of many illicit late-night wrestling and boxing matches, which, according to football historian Gary James, would have synergised with the church leaders who sought to harness the energy and boredom of the local men and turn them away from violent pastimes, offering the opportunity to re-appropriate the very land on which the travesties were being committed and re-sanctifying it with more wholesome and holy pursuits. A further eight (known) games were played during the season, with the St Mark's men failing to score their first win until their final game, though this came against Stalybridge Clarence, who could only field eight men and had to recruit from the spectators. The loose organisation of the early incarnation of the club means records of Manchester City's first ground are patchy, uncertain and in some places contradictory. The exact location of the pitch is unknown. Gary James notes that, the new team being a church initiative and a local social group, the first pitch was surely picked for its proximity to the St Mark's church in West Gorton, though the first documented match report claimed it was held in Longsight - presumably since that was the location of the rectory for the church.〔 ''The Book of Football'' (1905) mentions the pitch used for the club's first ever game, but going only so far as to say that by 1905 the pitch had been built upon by the Brooks and Doxey's Union Ironworks - still enough information to narrow down its location to somewhere roughly north of St Mark's church along what is now Wenlock Way.〔 Repeated attempts at identifying the precise location have been unsuccessful.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Early grounds of Manchester City F.C.」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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