Asking this knowing I’m guessing 1/2 the posters here were probably born after 1966.
I’m going to guess the 2019 win was more dramatic, but 1966 meant more since football is a bigger sport worldwide and England all but invented it.
OR——-is there a third English sporting accomplishment even more important than these???
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WAG as a non-Brit: Cricket still doesn’t hold a candle to football. 1966 World Cup hands down, in the eyes of the Brits.
If you want to see a nation totally lose the run of itself, have England win a football World Cup. I love cricket, i love it more than football, I 'd watch it over football pretty much any day of the week but I am in the extreme minority. To put it in American terms, if you’ve got NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL, football in England is all 4 of them at once. Rugby and cricket are nowhere near, and until England wins another football World Cup, 1966 trumps all.
English person here - the football World Cup, by a considerable margin.
Put it like this, it’s Monday morning in the office, and a few of the cricket loving guys are talking about it. Many people aren’t, really.
If we’d just won the football World Cup, my boss might have declared it a company holiday, and we’d all still be down the pub.
Agreed on all counts. Winning the Rugby World Cup in 2003 was probably slightly bigger than yesterday’s victory, but neither come close to winning a football World Cup. It simply has much greater mass appeal both in England and worldwide.
It is interesting to note (as many have done before me, already) that all three of these titles have involved extremely dramatic, last minute endings.
England chat, to the tune of Camptown Races;
“Two World Wars and one World Cup, doo dah, doo dah.”
Way more significant to the national sport psyche, beating Germany and the context.
On a scale of 1-10 I’ve got the football world cup at 10, cricket world cup at about a 7, Rugby world cup at 8, Andy Murray winning Wimbledon at 7, The GB Olympic Team triumphs or recent years at about an 8.
That’s my personal assessment anyway
Just curious, can you give me a number for a hypothetical (hey, only a couple goals away) England Women’s World Cup win?
Incidentally in one of the 1966 heros memoirs, (maybe Martin Peters?) he says that 1966 was not as big a deal when it actually happened as it later became. He pointed out there was a pretty damn good Test series that year and while people were delighted in winning, there were other sports distractions. Unlike then.
Wonder if in 20/30 years time it might be the same for this if cricket popularity recovers.
Getting to the semi final of the World Cup last year was a bigger deal for the majority of people
Cricket should only be played over five days anyway.
On the same scale (with which I happen to agree, though I wasn’t alive in '66), I’d probably give it a 6. It would be a big deal, but women’s sport just doesn’t get the same attention (IMO, because in absolute terms the quality is demonstrably and significantly lower, albeit it is catching up fast and I found this year’s WWC much more watchable than in the past).
I’m not sure about this. The viewing figures are starting to come out for the game yesterday and across all channels, the cricket reached 7.5m viewers, it seems. More than 10m watched the WWC semi between England and the USA, and I reckon if they’d got to the final, you’d be lumping on more.
There’s a danger in conflating how consequential something is with the viewing figures for it, but I think England’s women winning the football World Cup would be a bigger deal than winning the cricket has been yesterday. This is largely because it is football, I think.
Football World Cup 1966 all day long.
On the subject of cricket, here’s an interesting piece of trivia:
Who was the first international game of cricket played between?
The first ever international cricket game was between the US and Canada in 1844. The match was played at the grounds of the St George’s Cricket Club in New York.
FIFA numbers…
Its who watched at least 1 minute.
Reading actual numbers, the BBC sports page got 40 million hits for the CWCFinal vesus only 14 for Tennis.
Social Media was also dominated by the Cricket (surprisingly).
Online figures aren’t out yet,
2?
Cricket is a distinctively British game (yes, there are other countries that play it, some with much greater populations, but they’re all part of the Commonwealth). Americans don’t get excited when a US team wins the baseball World Series, because of course they did. If it’s really been that long since England won the Cricket World Cup, it seems to me like that’s the much more interesting fact.
Nearly everyone plays association football, though. The larger the field you’re competing against, the more significant the win.
Well, the second point I do agree with, but in your first point you imply that England really ‘should’ win the cricket, because it’s a British game (so is football, but anyway…). Which just doesn’t stack up - India and Pakistan are obsessed, it’s practically the only sport they play. England may have started cricket, but we’re also heavily focussed on many other sports (football, rugby, cycling, various Olympic sports, and on and on). It’s also been dropping in popularity. The real question is, why don’t India always win?
Worldwide, it would have to be the soccer World Cup, hands down. Heck, I’m not even a soccer fan, but I watch matches during the final stages of that tournament. I’ve never seen even a single Cricket match much less know any of the rules.
Peak TV audience in the UK - 8m for the cricket. Less than the Wimbledon men’s final and well behind the semi final of the Women’s World Cup figures.
I personally find it unsurprising that social media is dominated by the cricket - 1bn people love cricket across Southern Asia and are increasingly online and using British websites, as well as local ones, for the cricket - and following multiple journalists from across the globe on Twitter. A whole load of the comments to the British cricket journalists I follow (like George Dobell, Vitushan Ehantharajah, etc) and Aussie guys like Jarrod Kimber come from followers in Asia. They’re massively important to the game and to helping drive money and interest, but the question is about what would be most important in England and it’s pretty clear it’s not the cricket. I still think if the English women won the World Cup in football, it would be a far bigger deal in the UK than the cricket has been.
You may be right, I won’t disagree, but that women’s world cup semi-final did not have to compete for viewers with the most prestigious tennis match of the year, played between two of the greatest players of all time, one of whom is a British crowd favourite going for a record-breaking win at an age when most players have long since retired. Not only that, it reached its peak (with another historic moment - the first 12-12 final set tiebreak in a Grand Slam) at more or less the same time of day.