page_title: Early grounds of Manchester City F.C.
section_title: Pink Bank Lane (1884–85)
hierarchical_section_title: Early grounds of Manchester City F.C. / Pink Bank Lane (1884–85)
caption_attribution_description: English: A photo of the St Marks (Gorton) football team in 1884. In accordance with section 12 of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and because the author of the original work is unknown, copyright expires seventy years after the work is first made available to the public. Thus 126 years have elapsed since the image was believed to have been taken sometime from 1880-1884
context_page_description: Before Manchester City Football Club moved into their first permanent home in Manchester, England, 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. The club was founded 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. The sport of football was 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 reformed and changed its name twice between 1880 and 1887, so its choice of locations were a series of low-cost, short-term solutions when their current location became untenable. In 1887, when City moved to their sixth pitch in only eight years, they had the money, ambition, reputation and stability to construct themselves a more permanent base of operations, at the stadium named Hyde Road.
context_section_description: Having left their former partners behind, the newly named Gorton A.F.C. once more took up residence on waste land, this time a patch on Pink Bank Lane, as recommended to them by striker and future manager and chairman Lawrence Furniss. Rent was agreed at £6 per year and the first recorded fixture on home soil was in fact played by the new club's 2nd XI, which beat Eccles 2nd XI 4–2. A week later, the first team inaugurated the pitch themselves with a 4–0 victory over rivals Gorton Villa F.C.
  The season also saw the formation of the Manchester & District Football Association, the organisation that was to become the present-day Manchester FA, and Gorton A.F.C. swiftly applied to join. Although no league football was entertained by the Gorton club – and indeed, they wouldn't enter a league system for another six seasons – the club did get its first taste of competitive football at Pink Bank Lane, with entry into the Manchester & District Challenge Cup, later to be known as the Manchester Senior Cup, and a competition in which Manchester City's reserve team continues to compete in with a history of lifting the trophy every few years. In 1884, however, Gorton's taste of cup football ended swiftly with a 1–0 loss in the First Round to Dalton Hall (Owens College) F.C. For the next several seasons, cup football would prove a tough nut to crack for the Gorton club.
  The season spent at Pink Bank Lane also saw witness to the use of the black shirt with cross pattée on the left breast. Though this was not the first kit that a Manchester City team ever wore, it remains both the first one for which pictographic records (indeed, for which any definite records) still exist and also remains one of the most popular and legendary kits among Manchester City fans, despite neither the black/white combination nor the cross pattée having ever been worn since. It is not known exactly when the shirts were first worn, though they were presented before the first recorded games of the season.
  The last recorded match played at the ground was a 24 January fixture against Manchester Clifford F.C., which Gorton won 3–0, though it is known that several more games of the same season were played for which no records now exist. During the following season, a £2 payment was received by the club in compensation for the loss of their playing field, Gary James pointing out that this surely was due recompense for the fact that – for reasons now no longer known but beyond the club's control – the land was made unavailable for use, and for the fourth time in five years a move to a new pitch was required.
caption: Gorton A.F.C. wearing their now-famous black shirts with cross pattée during the 1884–85 season. William Beastow, who gave the club the shirts, is reputedly the man on the far right
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