Talk:Sport in England

rivalry reference

The reference to rivalry with Scotland is out of date. The rivalry is bitter north of the border but this is not the view from the south. It used to be the main rivalry, but south of the border it is far less important than germany, argentina, france etc etc. If Scotland is mentioned so must these other teams! I have not checked, but I'll wager that it was put up by a writer from north of the border. It should either be removed, referenced with contemporary main stream sources (major newspaper) or moved to lower priority on the page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kinigi (talk • contribs) 17:18, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Official national sport

I've tagged the following sentence as requiring a citation:

"Cricket is the official national sport."

As far as I'm aware, England does not have an "official" national sport at all.Dancarney (talk) 16:29, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

|Easier just to edit it; "Cricket is the unofficial national sport." makes sense.GordyB (talk) 18:58, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I would've said that Football is the national sport, though - not that I have a citation for that either! Dancarney (talk) 22:49, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

There is a recurring debate on Wikipedia as to the precise meaning of the phrase "national sport". Some take it to mean "most popular sport" which is unquestionably football while others think that it is about which sport represents the "soul" of the country. In England, cricket can be argued to fufil this role.GordyB (talk) 23:02, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I think that without a citation the statement is invalid, as football could equally be argued to represent the "soul" of the nation.Dancarney (talk) 10:07, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

It depends which stereotype of England you follow - smartly-dressed tea-drinking snobs would be represented by cricket, drunken violent yobs by soccer. (don't complain, I'm English myself). --MartinUK (talk) 00:10, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

SOMEBODY SHOULD PROBABLY DELETE THIS

'Despite claiming creation of most sports the English have yet to dominate any of them. On almost all occasions they have been made to look fools in their own games by smaller nations. Think Ireland beating England in the recent cricket world cup, come to think of it Ireland have beaten England in almost every sporting event over the last 10 years. Things are now so bad in English sport that they have started recruiting players from abroad. The most recent English cricket team had only 4 English born players and they World Cup squad announced by England's head coach Kiwi Martin Johnson had 15 non English born players out of 45. That's a staggering 33%. This is almost unheard of in modern day sport but is a fair reflection on the standard of professional sportsman in England. English fans to protest have joined forces on online forums to complain, that's it, really.' — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.112.233 (talk) 15:34, 10 July 2011 (UTC)