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Rugby union

Main article: Rugby union in England

The four home nations compete separately at international level. They take part in the main European international rugby union competition, the Six Nations Championship. England won the 2003 Rugby World Cup, the first victory in the competition by a British team (or, for that matter, any Northern Hemisphere country).

The main rugby union club competition in England is a 12-team league called the Gallagher Premiership, and there is also a cup competition, the Premiership Rugby Cup, which since 2005 has included teams from Wales. Attendances at club rugby in England have risen strongly since the sport went professional. English club sides also take part in the two Europe-wide club rugby competitions, the European Rugby Champions Cup and the European Rugby Challenge Cup. English clubs such as Leicester Tigers, Bath Rugby, Wasps and Northampton Saints have had success in the predecessor to the Champions Cup, the Heineken Cup.

: Rugby league in England

Leeds Rhinos playing at the 2008 boxing day friendly against Wakefield Trinity Wildcats at Headingley Cricket Ground, Leeds

The governing body of rugby league in the United Kingdom is the Rugby Football League. Rugby league draws most of its support from its heartlands in Yorkshire, North West England, and Cumbria. Although playing numbers have recently topped 60,000 in London and the south east.

The top level league is the 12-team Super League, which was reduced from 14 teams due to a major reorganisation of the professional leagues in 2015. Eleven teams are based in the heartlands, with the other team in France. Below Super League are the Championship, also with 12 teams, and League 1, with 14 teams. As of the next season in 2018, the Championship has nine teams from the heartlands and one each from London, France and Canada; League 1 has nine heartland teams, three scattered throughout the remainder of England, and two from Wales.

Following the reorganisation, the seasons of Super League and the Championship are now much more closely integrated than in the past. Following a 22-game home-and-away season in both leagues, the leagues split into three eight-team groups known as "Super 8's". The first, the Super League Super 8's, involves the top eight teams on the Super League table. After these teams play a round-robin mini-league, with table points carrying over from the league season, the top four enter a knockout play-off that culminates in the Super League Grand Final at Old Trafford. The second group, the Qualifiers Super 8's, involves the bottom four teams from Super League and the top four from the Championship. After a similar round-robin mini-league (but with all teams starting on 0 points), the top three teams earn places in the following year's Super League. The fourth- and fifth-place teams then play a one-off match, billed as the "Million Pound Match", for the final Super League place. The final group, the Championship Shield Super 8's, involves the bottom eight teams from the Championship. These teams play their own round-robin mini-league, with table points carrying over. The top four teams after the extra games contest a knockout play-off for the Championship Shield, while the bottom two teams are relegated to League 1.

From 2009 through to 2014, Super League consisted of 14 franchises, based on renewable three-year licences, but that system was scrapped following the 2014 season. The main knock-out competition is the Challenge Cup, which also includes clubs from France, Canada, Wales and Scotland (plus, in the past, Russia) and each year culminates in a history-steeped final at Wembley Stadium. There is a secondary knock-out competition called the Championship Cup for teams in the Championships.

Rugby league is also played as an amateur sport, especially in the heartland areas, where the game is administered by BARLA. Since the rugby union authorities ended the discrimination against playing rugby league amateur numbers in the sport have increased, particularly outside the heartland areas. Through competitions such as the Rugby League Conference, consisting of one nationwide league of ten teams and twelve other regional leagues, including one Welsh and one Scottish league, the sport now has a national spread, at amateur level at least [1].

Internationally, England fields a competitive team in international rugby league. For many tournaments the home nations are combined to compete as Great Britain. The Great Britain team won the Rugby League World Cup in 1954, 1960 and 1972, but England and Wales now compete separately in this tournament and Australia held the title from 1975 until 2008 when they finally lost their grip on the title after being beaten by New Zealand in a thrilling final in Brisbane. England and Wales jointly hosted the most recent World Cup in 2013, with matches also held in France and Ireland; Australia regained the crown.

The England team competes in the annual Four Nations competition.

The England national rugby league team will compete more regularly as a full test nation, in lieu of the Great Britain national rugby league team, which, following the 2007 Centenary Test Series against New Zealand only reforms as an occasional southern hemisphere touring side.

Cricket

Main article: Cricket in England

Cricket is another popular team sport, ranking fourth in the country for viewership after Association Football, Rugby Union and Tennis.

Although there is some debate about the origins of the game, modern cricket is generally believed to have originated in England with the laws of cricket - adhered to by players at all levels worldwide - established by the London-based Marylebone Cricket Club. Although the origins of cricket in England date back as far as the sixteenth century, formal laws of the game began to be developed in the eighteenth century. Most recently, the globally popular Twenty20 format of cricket was innovated in England at the turn of the 21st century.

The England national cricket team is one of the twelve Full Members of the International Cricket Council, enabling England to participate in Test, One Day Internationals and Twenty20 International matches, as well as the ICC Cricket World Cup. Cricket in England is administered by the England and Wales Cricket Board, having been overseen by the Test and County Cricket Board until 1997.

England's professional domestic system consists of eighteen teams from the historic counties of England and Wales. These clubs participate in the County Championship, a two-tiered First Class cricket competition recognised as one of the oldest domestic cricket tournaments in the world, as well as the limited overs ECB 40 tournament (known as the Yorkshire Bank 40 for sponsorship reasons as of 2013) and the Friends Life t20. Twenty more clubs compete in the amateur Minor Counties Cricket Championship.

Cricket is a popular recreational sport in England, with hundreds of clubs playing at various levels; village cricket in particular is regarded as a key aspect of English culture. The Lancashire League was formed in 1892 and is renowned for the extensive list of professional players who have participated in it, particularly during the middle of the twentieth century.

Lord's Cricket Ground, located in the St. John's Wood area of London, is known as "the home of cricket" and in addition to housing the Marylebone Cricket Club, is also the headquarters of the European Cricket Council and was until 2005 the headquarters of the International Cricket Council. England has hosted four ICC Cricket World Cups to date, in 1975, 1979, 1983 and 1999, and is scheduled to host the 2019 competition. In addition to these tournaments, England has also hosted the 2009 ICC World Twenty20 and the ICC Champions Trophy in 2004 and 2013.

England enjoys a hotly contested and storied rivalry with Australia, against whom they compete for The Ashes in a contest that dates back to the nineteenth century. As of 2015, England are holders of the Ashes having regained the trophy on The Australian tour of England and Ireland. The English cricket team also enjoys rivalries against India and the West Indies, although the latter is no longer as fierce as it was during its peak in the 1980s.

England is also a pioneering nation in the sport of Indoor Cricket. The first organised indoor cricket league in the world took place in 1970 in North Shropshire,^[6] and the first national tournament was completed in 1976 with over 400 clubs taking part. By 1979 over 1000 clubs were taking part in indoor cricket in the UK, and it remains extremely popular today with many leagues around the country