Yorkshire County Cricket Club celebrate their 150th birthday today.

Formed on January 8, 1863 at the Adelphi Hotel in Sheffield, the club have gone on to become outright county champions a record 30 times as well as winning five one-day trophies.

Yorkshire will hold a Sesquicentennial Soiree at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, the original location of the Adelphi, tonight.

Speakers will include current players Steve Patterson and Ben Coad, an Academy fast bowler, while the evening will also see county president Geoffrey Boycott and fellow former England captain Michael Vaughan conduct a question and answer session.

Another speaker will be former T&A Yorkshire correspondent David Warner, author of The Sweetest Rose, 150 years of Yorkshire CCC.

“I made a point of referring exclusively to my own notes from starting as the T&A correspondent in 1975 right up to my final season in 2007,” said Warner.

“I wanted to make sure that in taking readers through the controversial years of the Boycott and Illingworth sagas, I was not influenced by the opinions of others.

“I worked from well over 80 volumes of newspaper cuttings which I had collected over 33 seasons of watching Yorkshire home and away.”

Although matches were played by a Yorkshire team as early as 1833, it was only some 30 years later that Yorkshire CCC was born.

The first of 33 captains was all-rounder Roger Iddison, a man who also played for Roses rivals Lancashire.

Iddison even played a three-day match for Lancashire one week and Yorkshire the next in July, 1965.

Current Yorkshire captain Andrew Gale joked: “Can you imagine me doing that? With my track record with Lancashire, I don’t think they’d have me.

“I’d probably never be able to walk down a street in Yorkshire again if I did anything like that.

“You read David Warner’s book and you can cringe at some of the stuff that went on. But there’s also lots of really special stuff that’s gone on in our history.

“You look at the team of the 1960s who won the championship seven out of ten seasons and that’s amazing. If the current team have half that success, I’m sure we’d go down as legends.”

Gale described the possibility of winning the championship this year as “a fairytale story”.