Sport in England

Main article: Cricket in England

Cricketer W.G. Grace
Cricket is another popular team sport, regarded as one of the national sports of England and the second most popular and followed sport in the country.
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. It is one of only 2 countries in Europe to be full ICC members, along with the Ireland cricket team.
England's professional domestic system consists of eighteen teams from the historic counties of England and Wales, playing a variety of matches over the summer cricket season. 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 50 Overs tournament (known as the Royal London One Day Cup for sponsorship reasons as of 2019) and the Vitality T20 Blast, which has notably helped in popularising the domestic aspect of the game. Twenty more clubs compete in the amateur Minor Counties Cricket Championship. The Hundred, a new franchise based and new format of the game was scheduled to begin as a domestic competition in the 2020 season, but has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cricket is a popular recreational and summer 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. It is also a popular school and university sport in the summer.
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 five ICC Cricket World Cups to date, in 1975, 1979, 1983, 1999 and 2019. In addition to these tournaments, England has also hosted the 2009 ICC World Twenty20 and the ICC Champions Trophy in 2004 and 2013.
England have won one ICC Cricket World Cup, in 2019. They previously finished as runners up in the 1979, 1987 and 1992 tournaments. In addition, England won the 2010 ICC World Twenty20 in the Caribbean.
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 2019, Australia are holders of the Ashes having retained the trophy in 2017–18 Ashes series, retaining the Ashes urn in a drawn series in 2019. 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.^[7]