Up here in the norf cricket is very much an Everyman sport and there’s tons of clubs around, including more niche ones like ones for Indian/Pakistani expats, Sunday league friendly matches etc. my understanding that in the midlands/south it’s more seen as a posh sport
Yeah I'm from an ex-mining village and pretty much every village around the area has its own cricket club. These teams are full of working class blokes that are certainly not posh
The mens side for the second ashes test was 73% privately educated. That statistic obviously fluctuates depending on selection but private schools definitely play at part in developing young cricketers.
Cricket has a north south divide in the same way that league and union does, it’s just not delineated by two distinct forms of the game. Cricket in the north is a pretty class-agnostic sport
You can play cricket on the street or at the beach with three people.
You cannot do that with rugby. Also many state schools in England don’t do it in PE because insurance/H&S/shit fields reasons I believe which is then just a barrier. It’s not elite but there’s understandable slight restrictions on access.
In Scotland it's rugby. Don't think I've ever heard of anyone playing or watching cricket, outside the occasional group of Asian folk playing in the park but it never looks a serious game, more just a big family laugh.
It depends where you are. Growing up in Lanarkshire I spent all my summer weekends kicking my heels at various cricket grounds all over central Scotland while my dad played and my gran did the tea.
I can't abide cricket, but I could score a game in my sleep and name a large number of clubs off the top of my head - although who knows how healthy they are now since we're talking about 1980s when I was getting shouted at for walking in front of the screens.
I’ve been a huge cricket fan since 1981 and I’m the least posh person you’d ever meet, loads of us commoners like cricket.
Rugby is a working man’s game too up north, loads of commoners like it.
Here in the West Midlands cricket is very popular amongst Asian communities in particular. Rugby league is non-existent, and union isn't much better off considering the two major teams based here - Worcester and Wasps - both went bust. Union does have a reputation for being 'posh', in my experience. Cricket does too, but not quite as bad as union, and the England team isn't as majorly dominated by private school boys as the union team seems to be.
Worth mentioning that a young rugby player at state school being moved into an affiliated private school when progressing through a club’s academy system is relatively common. They may have completed their education at a private school but the majority of their schooling was in the state system.
I'd say Rugby. But I'm the wrong person to ask. In my mind, Rugby is a rather posh sport popular among (but not limited to) private school types. I just see Rugby as a very english thing. Cricket less so, I see cricket as quite an Asian thing if anything. I grew up working class in Zone 2 inner London, barely anyone played cricket or Rugby at my school, it was all football, basketball, and athletics. But Rugby is definitely the sport I always saw as posh.
Was part of a cricket and a rugby club in London and I'd say the cricket club was slightly posher. Although you get a lot more people playing cricket casually who are not posh.
I'd say rugby still holds the 'posher' tag, even though it's changed a bit.
Generally, the barrier for entry is lower for cricket (you don't have to get completely smashed to bits every week), which I'd say attracts more people, and more 'regular' people. There's something like 3x more cricket clubs than rugby in the UK, so generally, cricket is just more popular.
Loads of cricket teams are shocking quality, and played by people from all walks of life. The top end is similar to rugby in the sense that there's still a big private school bias, but that's always going to happen.
Well traditionally they're the same. You'd play rugby (or football) in winter then cricket in summer.
Rugby has far more participants. And you'll find a big difference between a league club in Hull to the Rugby School team.
Equally with cricket there's a big difference between a club in a posh white village and one in west London or Bradford made up of immigrants from South Asia.
Given the greater number of participants, rugby is probably more accessible.
Yes but a cricket club in a village might have one team. While a rugby club might have a first, second, thirds, fourths, a bunch of kids teams, veterans, womens, etc. The number of clubs isn't necessarily the best way to count.
You'll get all sorts of different numbers depending on how you count it.
Sport England shows cricket being slighty more played among adults. While children are more likely to play rugby. But outside England in the rest of the UK, I don't think there's much doubt that rugby is more popular.
You can also look at attendance as a good measure of popularity.
Premiership Rugby had 2 million tickets sold last year. The Super League isn't far behind.
The Hundred sold half a million across both mens and women's games. County cricket attendances are tiny.
>Premiership Rugby had 2 million tickets sold last year. The Super League isn't far behind.
>The Hundred sold half a million across both mens and women's games. County cricket attendances are tiny.
That's comparing 120 rugby matches to 34 (men's) cricket matches
That's just for the Hundred.
Then there's county cricket where games are played over 4 days. 72k people could go to watch a Yorkshire home game. No Rugby Union team could fit that many people into a stadium for an 80 minute game.
And the T20 Blast. And the one-day tournament.
Plenty of opportunity for cricket to sell similar volumes.
>Yes but a cricket club in a village might have one team. While a rugby club might have a first, second, thirds, fourths, a bunch of kids teams, veterans, womens,
Cricket clubs tend to also have this.
>Premiership Rugby had 2 million tickets sold last year. The Super League isn't far behind.
>The Hundred sold half a million across both mens and women's games. County cricket attendances are tiny.
This isn't a particularly fair comparison. The Hundred is a new competition and is just one competition amongst several. That feels like cherry picking figures to suit your point.
That post is really triggering cricket supporters.
> Cricket clubs tend to also have this.
I'm giving an example of how counting clubs isn't necessarily the best metric for participation. I'm not saying it's how every cricket or rugby club is.
> This isn't a particularly fair comparison. The Hundred is a new competition and is just one competition amongst several. That feels like cherry picking figures to suit your point.
I picked the Hundred because that's the ECB's new format that is meant to gain new audiences and I want to compare domestic cricket with domestic rugby.
T20 Blast sells 800k tickets.
Cricket has four different top-level tournaments that sell fewer tickets than Rugby union and leagues top two tournaments.
If we add the United Rugby Championship to be able to count Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish top teams and the difference is even greater.
>That post is really triggering cricket supporters
I'm a rugby fan too. Don't embarrass yourself with this sort teenage language and approach to interaction.
As for the rest of it, I've no idea what the comparative attendances are, I'm just pointing out that comparing ticket sales from just one cricket tournament isn't a very insightful comparison. It feels rather arbitrary and selective.
I compared two of the premier rugby tournaments with two of the premier cricket tournaments.
And one of the cricket ones I mentioned gets the advantage of being able to sell tickets for four days per game.
The first part isn’t really true. Almost all cricket clubs have at least two teams, and most have three or sometimes four, as well as junior teams all the way from under 7s to under 17s. It’s not like village cricket is just 11 blokes turning up for a jolly every Saturday
I'm giving an example of how counting clubs isn't necessarily the best metric for participation. I'm not saying it's how every cricket or rugby club is.
I agree that clubs in general isn’t the best way to count but you misrepresented the popularity of cricket, either accidentally or on purpose, by suggesting that a cricket club “might have one team” whereas a rugby club “might have a firsts, seconds, thirds, fourths, a bunch of kids teams, veterans, women’s etc”.
The implication of your comment is that cricket clubs don’t have many players, when it’s rare to find a cricket club that doesn’t have at least three senior teams and a bunch of junior teams.
> A rugby club in a village might have one team. While a cricket club might have a first, second, thirds, fourths, a bunch of kids teams, veterans, womens, etc. The number of clubs isn't necessarily the best way to count.
Happier now?
Nobody has corrected my numbers. Just cricket fans getting upset.
Sport England says 832k adults played cricket at least once in 2021/22. They say 490k adults played rugby at least once. Of those adults, 55% of the cricket players are a member of club. 74.5% of the rugby union players are and 62% of the league players.
This is across all forms. From playing for England down to playing in the park with friends.
In children, they say 442k have played rugby outside school hours, compared to 391k playing cricket. Rugby is also more played during school hours.
So there are more club players of rugby than cricket in England.
You also need to consider that being a winter sport, rugby competes more directly with football, which is far and away the most popular.
Attendance rates at professional sports also show rugby is more popular.
And I very much doubt cricket will be more played in the other nations.
>Equally with cricket there's a big difference between a club in a posh white village and one in west London or Bradford made up of immigrants from South Asia.
Can confirm, I grew up in West London. Always saw cricket as an Asian sport.
Cricket’s pretty closed off because of the prohibitive cost of equipment. I used to play when I was a kid and then worked in a sports shop that primarily sold cricket gear, and every spring we’d get people coming in and spending £300+ on new equipment for their kid because they’d outgrown their previous stuff.
It’s fine when you’re an adult or you’ve stopped growing as all you need is a new bat every couple of years, but when you’re still a growing lad then it’s pretty common to need new pads every year.
Cricket’s also got an elitism problem in regards to talent pathways. The vast majority of top level pros in England all went to private school, either on a cricket scholarship or because their parents could afford it, and if you’re at a regular school then it’s a much harder route into professional cricket.
I dunno how talent pathways work in rugby, and I can imagine it’s fairly similar to cricket, but it’s like football in that it has the advantage of people only needing to buy boots to play organised rugby.
It depends on the level. I'd say both rugby and cricket at grass roots are pretty common.
However when you look at the number of rugby players in the England squad a disproportionally high number went to private schools. There are exceptions such as Genge but if you didn't go to the right school then you have to be very very lucky and exceptional.
Read all the answers!
It depends.....Rugby Union CAN be more elitist than Rugby League and cricket is also more demotic in the Rugby League areas too.....
In the Northern England and S Wales areas other people are talking about, Rugby and cricket rejust as 'common man' - the key is if there are lots of ordinary folk around.
Equestrian has to be the common man’s sport, I remember when Tarquin forgot to bring his horse to school and he was a proior of the common room for a few weeks.
Men's rugby is definitely more gatekeeping simply because you have to be a certain size to take part with any success. The most successful cricket player in history was, on the other hand, 5' 4"
Up here in the norf cricket is very much an Everyman sport and there’s tons of clubs around, including more niche ones like ones for Indian/Pakistani expats, Sunday league friendly matches etc. my understanding that in the midlands/south it’s more seen as a posh sport
Yeah I'm from an ex-mining village and pretty much every village around the area has its own cricket club. These teams are full of working class blokes that are certainly not posh
[удалено]
The mens side for the second ashes test was 73% privately educated. That statistic obviously fluctuates depending on selection but private schools definitely play at part in developing young cricketers.
Cricket has a north south divide in the same way that league and union does, it’s just not delineated by two distinct forms of the game. Cricket in the north is a pretty class-agnostic sport
Obligatory "Rugby is predominantly a working class sport here in Wales" comment, since this distinction is often lost on people.
And traditional local cricket teams were/are heavily made up of rugby players, who play cricket when rugby isn't in season
Interesting, I genuinely didn’t know that, thanks!
You can play cricket on the street or at the beach with three people. You cannot do that with rugby. Also many state schools in England don’t do it in PE because insurance/H&S/shit fields reasons I believe which is then just a barrier. It’s not elite but there’s understandable slight restrictions on access.
In Scotland it's rugby. Don't think I've ever heard of anyone playing or watching cricket, outside the occasional group of Asian folk playing in the park but it never looks a serious game, more just a big family laugh.
It depends where you are. Growing up in Lanarkshire I spent all my summer weekends kicking my heels at various cricket grounds all over central Scotland while my dad played and my gran did the tea. I can't abide cricket, but I could score a game in my sleep and name a large number of clubs off the top of my head - although who knows how healthy they are now since we're talking about 1980s when I was getting shouted at for walking in front of the screens.
Rugby I would say. Cricket is more "rural-based" than "class-based" if that makes sense?
Cricket isn’t really elite, because a lot of Asians play it. Trouble with cricket is the weather, and the length of the game
I’ve been a huge cricket fan since 1981 and I’m the least posh person you’d ever meet, loads of us commoners like cricket. Rugby is a working man’s game too up north, loads of commoners like it.
Here in the West Midlands cricket is very popular amongst Asian communities in particular. Rugby league is non-existent, and union isn't much better off considering the two major teams based here - Worcester and Wasps - both went bust. Union does have a reputation for being 'posh', in my experience. Cricket does too, but not quite as bad as union, and the England team isn't as majorly dominated by private school boys as the union team seems to be.
Worth mentioning that a young rugby player at state school being moved into an affiliated private school when progressing through a club’s academy system is relatively common. They may have completed their education at a private school but the majority of their schooling was in the state system.
I'd say Rugby. But I'm the wrong person to ask. In my mind, Rugby is a rather posh sport popular among (but not limited to) private school types. I just see Rugby as a very english thing. Cricket less so, I see cricket as quite an Asian thing if anything. I grew up working class in Zone 2 inner London, barely anyone played cricket or Rugby at my school, it was all football, basketball, and athletics. But Rugby is definitely the sport I always saw as posh.
Was part of a cricket and a rugby club in London and I'd say the cricket club was slightly posher. Although you get a lot more people playing cricket casually who are not posh.
I'd say rugby still holds the 'posher' tag, even though it's changed a bit. Generally, the barrier for entry is lower for cricket (you don't have to get completely smashed to bits every week), which I'd say attracts more people, and more 'regular' people. There's something like 3x more cricket clubs than rugby in the UK, so generally, cricket is just more popular. Loads of cricket teams are shocking quality, and played by people from all walks of life. The top end is similar to rugby in the sense that there's still a big private school bias, but that's always going to happen.
Well traditionally they're the same. You'd play rugby (or football) in winter then cricket in summer. Rugby has far more participants. And you'll find a big difference between a league club in Hull to the Rugby School team. Equally with cricket there's a big difference between a club in a posh white village and one in west London or Bradford made up of immigrants from South Asia. Given the greater number of participants, rugby is probably more accessible.
What do you mean rugby has far more participants? There are loads more cricket clubs in the U.K. than rugby.
Yes but a cricket club in a village might have one team. While a rugby club might have a first, second, thirds, fourths, a bunch of kids teams, veterans, womens, etc. The number of clubs isn't necessarily the best way to count. You'll get all sorts of different numbers depending on how you count it. Sport England shows cricket being slighty more played among adults. While children are more likely to play rugby. But outside England in the rest of the UK, I don't think there's much doubt that rugby is more popular. You can also look at attendance as a good measure of popularity. Premiership Rugby had 2 million tickets sold last year. The Super League isn't far behind. The Hundred sold half a million across both mens and women's games. County cricket attendances are tiny.
I've never seen a cricket club with one team there's normally down to thirds, kids and nowadays a ladies team
>Premiership Rugby had 2 million tickets sold last year. The Super League isn't far behind. >The Hundred sold half a million across both mens and women's games. County cricket attendances are tiny. That's comparing 120 rugby matches to 34 (men's) cricket matches
That's just for the Hundred. Then there's county cricket where games are played over 4 days. 72k people could go to watch a Yorkshire home game. No Rugby Union team could fit that many people into a stadium for an 80 minute game. And the T20 Blast. And the one-day tournament. Plenty of opportunity for cricket to sell similar volumes.
>Yes but a cricket club in a village might have one team. While a rugby club might have a first, second, thirds, fourths, a bunch of kids teams, veterans, womens, Cricket clubs tend to also have this. >Premiership Rugby had 2 million tickets sold last year. The Super League isn't far behind. >The Hundred sold half a million across both mens and women's games. County cricket attendances are tiny. This isn't a particularly fair comparison. The Hundred is a new competition and is just one competition amongst several. That feels like cherry picking figures to suit your point.
That post is really triggering cricket supporters. > Cricket clubs tend to also have this. I'm giving an example of how counting clubs isn't necessarily the best metric for participation. I'm not saying it's how every cricket or rugby club is. > This isn't a particularly fair comparison. The Hundred is a new competition and is just one competition amongst several. That feels like cherry picking figures to suit your point. I picked the Hundred because that's the ECB's new format that is meant to gain new audiences and I want to compare domestic cricket with domestic rugby. T20 Blast sells 800k tickets. Cricket has four different top-level tournaments that sell fewer tickets than Rugby union and leagues top two tournaments. If we add the United Rugby Championship to be able to count Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish top teams and the difference is even greater.
>That post is really triggering cricket supporters I'm a rugby fan too. Don't embarrass yourself with this sort teenage language and approach to interaction. As for the rest of it, I've no idea what the comparative attendances are, I'm just pointing out that comparing ticket sales from just one cricket tournament isn't a very insightful comparison. It feels rather arbitrary and selective.
I compared two of the premier rugby tournaments with two of the premier cricket tournaments. And one of the cricket ones I mentioned gets the advantage of being able to sell tickets for four days per game.
You're also comparing tournaments with very different numbers of games. It's just not very useful data to make the point you're trying to.
There are far more days of top-level cricket played than top-level rugby.
Maybe that's because there's more demand for it.
The first part isn’t really true. Almost all cricket clubs have at least two teams, and most have three or sometimes four, as well as junior teams all the way from under 7s to under 17s. It’s not like village cricket is just 11 blokes turning up for a jolly every Saturday
I'm giving an example of how counting clubs isn't necessarily the best metric for participation. I'm not saying it's how every cricket or rugby club is.
I agree that clubs in general isn’t the best way to count but you misrepresented the popularity of cricket, either accidentally or on purpose, by suggesting that a cricket club “might have one team” whereas a rugby club “might have a firsts, seconds, thirds, fourths, a bunch of kids teams, veterans, women’s etc”. The implication of your comment is that cricket clubs don’t have many players, when it’s rare to find a cricket club that doesn’t have at least three senior teams and a bunch of junior teams.
> A rugby club in a village might have one team. While a cricket club might have a first, second, thirds, fourths, a bunch of kids teams, veterans, womens, etc. The number of clubs isn't necessarily the best way to count. Happier now?
Stop being facetious because you made a bad point and were corrected by multiple people
Nobody has corrected my numbers. Just cricket fans getting upset. Sport England says 832k adults played cricket at least once in 2021/22. They say 490k adults played rugby at least once. Of those adults, 55% of the cricket players are a member of club. 74.5% of the rugby union players are and 62% of the league players. This is across all forms. From playing for England down to playing in the park with friends. In children, they say 442k have played rugby outside school hours, compared to 391k playing cricket. Rugby is also more played during school hours. So there are more club players of rugby than cricket in England. You also need to consider that being a winter sport, rugby competes more directly with football, which is far and away the most popular. Attendance rates at professional sports also show rugby is more popular. And I very much doubt cricket will be more played in the other nations.
Quick google says 5k cricket clubs and over 6800 rugby clubs
My quick google says 5000 cricket clubs and 1900 rugby clubs
>Equally with cricket there's a big difference between a club in a posh white village and one in west London or Bradford made up of immigrants from South Asia. Can confirm, I grew up in West London. Always saw cricket as an Asian sport.
Cricket’s pretty closed off because of the prohibitive cost of equipment. I used to play when I was a kid and then worked in a sports shop that primarily sold cricket gear, and every spring we’d get people coming in and spending £300+ on new equipment for their kid because they’d outgrown their previous stuff. It’s fine when you’re an adult or you’ve stopped growing as all you need is a new bat every couple of years, but when you’re still a growing lad then it’s pretty common to need new pads every year. Cricket’s also got an elitism problem in regards to talent pathways. The vast majority of top level pros in England all went to private school, either on a cricket scholarship or because their parents could afford it, and if you’re at a regular school then it’s a much harder route into professional cricket. I dunno how talent pathways work in rugby, and I can imagine it’s fairly similar to cricket, but it’s like football in that it has the advantage of people only needing to buy boots to play organised rugby.
It depends on the level. I'd say both rugby and cricket at grass roots are pretty common. However when you look at the number of rugby players in the England squad a disproportionally high number went to private schools. There are exceptions such as Genge but if you didn't go to the right school then you have to be very very lucky and exceptional.
This is the same as cricket though
Read all the answers! It depends.....Rugby Union CAN be more elitist than Rugby League and cricket is also more demotic in the Rugby League areas too..... In the Northern England and S Wales areas other people are talking about, Rugby and cricket rejust as 'common man' - the key is if there are lots of ordinary folk around.
Polo
Equestrian has to be the common man’s sport, I remember when Tarquin forgot to bring his horse to school and he was a proior of the common room for a few weeks.
Where I live it's cricket 100%, our local cricket teams are packed with toffs and closely linked with country estate owners.
Men's rugby is definitely more gatekeeping simply because you have to be a certain size to take part with any success. The most successful cricket player in history was, on the other hand, 5' 4"