Sport
The town has relatively successful sport clubs. Its rugby league club, Halifax RLFC, plays in Co-operative Championship. The town's football team, F.C. Halifax Town formed from the ashes of Halifax Town A.F.C. after the club was liquidated while in the Football Conference. They reformed three leagues below and now currently play in the Blue Square Conference North division.
Halifax is one of the most historic rugby league clubs in the game, formed over a century ago, in 1873 in the Yorkshire town of Halifax. Known as 'Fax', the official club colours are blue and white hoops, hence the former 1990s nickname: The Blue Sox. Halifax are also one of the original twenty-two rugby clubs that formed the Northern Rugby Football Union in 1895, making them one of the world's first rugby league clubs. They have rivalries with local neighbours Bradford and Huddersfield. Halifax have won the Rugby Football League Championship on four occasions: in 1902–03, 1906–07, 1964–65, 1985–86 and the Challenge Cup five times: in 1903, 1904, 1931, 1939 and 1987. They won the Co-operative Championship Grand Final in 2010. Halifax played at the Thrum Hall ground from 1886 to 1998. The ground staged rugby for 112 years and closed its gates for the last time after Halifax had won what was misleadingly billed as a friendly against Leeds 35–28.
Since then both teams share the Shay football ground, which is the largest ground used by a non-league football club in England. In the 1960s Halifax Town played Millwall in a Fourth Division match that had the lowest attendance ever recorded for a professional match in England. The Crossley Heath Grammar School normally excels in nationwide school rugby union competitions.
Motorcycle speedway racing has been staged at two venues in Halifax. In the pioneering days of 1928–1930 a track operated at Thrum Hall. A Halifax team took part in the English Dirt Track League of 1929. Speedway returned to Halifax at the Shay Stadium in 1949 and operated until 1951. The team operated as the Halifax Nomads in 1948 racing three away fixtures. The Halifax Dukes, the name they took once the Shay was opened, operated in the National League Third Division in 1949 before moving up to the Second Division in 1950. Riders including Arthur Forrest, moved on to Bradford. The Dukes re-emerged in 1965 as founder members of the British League and operated there for many years before the team moved en bloc to Odsal Stadium, Bradford. The steeply banked bends of the track at the Shay have been buried under stands at either end when the spectator facilities were squared off.
Read more about this topic: Halifax, West Yorkshire
Famous quotes containing the word sport:
“For generations, a wide range of shooting in Northern Ireland has provided all sections of the population with a pastime which ... has occupied a great deal of leisure time. Unlike many other countries, the outstanding characteristic of the sport has been that it was not confined to any one class.”
—Northern Irish Tourist Board. quoted in New Statesman (London, Aug. 29, 1969)
“How long, then, Catiline, while you abuse our patience? How long is this madness of yours to make sport of us?”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“Americans living in Latin American countries are often more snobbish than the Latins themselves. The typical American has quite a bit of money by Latin American standards, and he rarely sees a countryman who doesn’t. An American businessman who would think nothing of being seen in a sport shirt on the streets of his home town will be shocked and offended at a suggestion that he appear in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, in anything but a coat and tie.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)