Sports in UK

8/6/2019 Sports in UK

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The most popular sports from

the United Kingdom

Sport is playing an important role in the everyday life of the British people, from the children

from the first grade, up to the third generation, almost all of them are practicing at least one sport.

Most of the sports that we practice today were founded in the United Kingdom, because the

britains are very creatives and innovatives and they have a great interest in sports. And for those

reasons in Great Britain we can find almost all the sports from all around the world.

The most popular sports form the United Kingdom and the ones that was given birth in this

region are: football, rugby, cricket, golf, tennis, badminton, hockey, boxing, snooker, billiards and

curling.

Football

The modern global game of

football evolved out of traditional

football games played in England in the

19th century and today is the highest

profile sport by a very wide margin. This

has been the case for generations, but thegap is widely perceived to have

increased since the early 1990s, and

football's dominance is often seen as a

threat to other sports.

The game of football is any of

several similar team sports, of similar

origins which involve advancing a ball

into a goal area in an attempt to score. Many of these involve kicking a ball with the foot to score a

goal, though not all codes of football using kicking as a primary means of advancing the ball or

scoring. The most popular of these sports worldwide is association football, more commonly known

as just "football" or "soccer".

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The English football league system includes

hundreds of inter-linked leagues, consisting of

thousands of clubs, topped by four fully

professional divisions. The Premier League at the

top, is the most-watched football league in the

world. Below this, The Football League has threedivisions and then the Football Conference has a

national division and two feeder regional leagues.

The two main cup competitions in England are the

FA Cup, which is open to every men's football team

in England, though only professional clubs ever

reach the last few rounds, and the League Cup

(currently known as the Carling Cup), which is for the ninety-two professional clubs in the four main

professional divisions only.

England has over a hundred fully professional clubs in total, which is considerably more than

any other country in Europe. English teams have been successful in European Competitions

including some who have become European Cup/UEFA Champions League winners: Liverpool(five times), Manchester United (three times), Nottingham Forest (twice) and Aston Villa. More

clubs from England have won the European Cup than any other country

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland compete as separate countries in international

competition and, as a consequence, the UK does not compete as a single team in football events at

the Olympic Games. There are proposals to have a UK team take part in the 2012 Summer Olympics

but the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish football associations have declined to participate, fearing

that it would undermine their independent status. England has been the most successful of the home

nations, winning the World Cup on home soil in 1966, although there has historically been a close-

fought rivalry between England and Scotland.

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped

field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as

many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus

limit the runs scored by the batting team. A run is scored by the striking batsman hitting the ball with

his bat, running to the opposite end of the pitch and touching the crease there without being

dismissed. The teams switch between batting and fielding at the end of an innings.

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In professional cricket the length of a game ranges from 20 overs of six bowling deliveries per

side to Test cricket played over five days. The Laws of Cricket are maintained by the International

Cricket Council (ICC) and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) with additional Standard Playing

Conditions for Test matches and One Day Internationals.

Cricket was first played in southern England in the 16th century. By the end of the 18th

century, it had developed into the national sport of England. The expansion of the British Empire ledto cricket being played overseas and by the mid-19th century the first international matches were

being held. The ICC, the game's governing body, has ten full members.

Rugby

The origin of rugby football is reputed to be an incident during a game of English school

football at Rugby School in 1823 when William Webb-Ellis is said to have picked up the ball and

run with it. Although this tale is anecdotal, the Rugby World Cup trophy is named after him. Rugby

football stems from the form of game played at Rugby School, which old pupils initially took to

university.

The first rugby football international took place on 27 March 1871, played between England

and Scotland. By 1881 both Ireland and Wales had representative teams, and in 1883 the first

international competition, the Home Nations Championship had begun.

Rugby union is a full contact team sport which originated in England in the early 19th century.

One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand. It is played withan oval-shaped ball on a field up to 100 metres long and 70 metres wide with H-shaped goal posts on

each goal line.

The International Rugby Board (IRB) has been the governing body for rugby union since its

formation in 1886. Currently, 115 national unions are members of the IRB. In 1995, the IRB

removed restrictions on payments to players, making the game openly professional at the highest

level for the first time.

The Rugby World Cup, first held in 1987, takes place every four years, with the winner of the

tournament receiving the Webb Ellis Cup. The Six Nations in Europe and the Tri Nations in the

southern hemisphere are major international competitions held annually.

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Golf

Golf is a precision club-and-ball sport, in which competing players (or golfers), using many

types of clubs, attempt to hit balls into each hole on a golf course while employing the fewest

number of strokes.

It is one of the few ball games that does not require a standardized playing area. Instead, the

game is played on golf "courses", each of which features a unique design, although courses typically

consist of either nine or eighteen holes. Golf is defined, in the rules of golf, as "playing a ball with a

club from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the

Rules."Golf competition is generally played for the lowest number of strokes by an individual, known

simply as stroke play, or the lowest score on the most individual holes during a complete round by

an individual or team, known as match play.

Modern competitive golf originated in Scotland. In the early 20th century British golfers were

the best in the world, winning nearly all of the U.S. Open championships before World War I.

American golfers later became dominant, but Britain has continued to produce leading golfers, with

an especially strong period in the 1980s and 1990s.

Golf is the sixth most popular sport, by participation, in the UK. The Open Championship,

which is played each July on a number of British golf courses on a rotating basis, the majority of

them in Scotland, is the only men's major golf tournament which is played outside of the United

States.

Boxing

The United Kingdom played a key role in the evolution of modern boxing, with the

codification of the rules of the sport known as the Queensberry Rules in the 19th century.

British professional boxing offers some of the largest purses outside the United States to a few

elite professional boxers who become nationally known. British heavyweight contenders are

especially popular, but most British world champions have fought in the middling weight brackets.

The governing body of professional boxing is the British Boxing Board of Control. It is generally

felt that British professional boxing is in decline in the early years of the 21st century.

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T ennis

Tennis is a sport usually played between two players

(singles) or between two teams of two players each

(doubles). Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a

hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into theopponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played

at all levels of society at all ages. The sport can be played

by anyone who can hold a racket, including people in

wheelchairs.

The modern game of tennis originated in the United

Kingdom in the late 19th century as "lawn tennis" which

has close connections to various field/lawn games as well

as to the ancient game of real tennis.

The Championships, Wimbledon, or simply

Wimbledon, is the oldest tennis tournament in the world

and is considered the most prestigious. It has been held at

the All England Club in the London suburb of Wimbledon

since 1877. It is one of the four Grand Slam tennis

tournaments the other three Majors are the Australian

Open, French Open and US Open and the only one still

played on the game's original surface, grass, which gave the

game of lawn tennis its name.

The tournament takes place over two weeks in late June and early July, culminating with the

Ladies' and Gentlemen's Singles Final, scheduled respectively for the second Saturday and Sunday.

Each year, five major events are contested, as well as four junior events and four invitational events.

Tennis is enjoyed by millions of recreational players and is also a hugely popular worldwidespectator sport, especially the four Grand Slam tournaments.

Badminton

Badminton is a racquet sport played by either two opposing

players (singles) or two opposing pairs (doubles), who take

positions on opposite halves of a rectangular court that is divided

by a net. Players score points by striking a shuttlecock (also known

as a shuttle, bird, or birdy) with their racquet so that it passes over

the net and lands in their opponents' half of the court. Each side

may only strike the shuttlecock once before it passes over the net. Arally ends once the shuttlecock has struck the floor.

The beginnings of Badminton can be traced to mid-18th

century British India, where it was created by British military

officers stationed there.

The new sport was definitively launched in 1873 at the

Badminton House, Gloucestershire, owned by the Duke of

Beaufort. During that time, the game was referred to as "The Game

of Badminton," and the game's official name became Badminton.

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Hockey

A game played on ice with a curved bat and a ball existed before Ice Hockey in the form of

Colf on ice, which was a popular game in the Low Countries between the Middle Ages. The game

was played with a wooden curved bat (called Colf or Kolf) and a ball made of wood or leather

between two poles or simply convenient nearby landmarks, with the object of hitting the chosen

point with the least number of strokes.

However, most believe that ice hockey evolved from stick-and-ball games, played outdoors,

and adapted to the icy conditions of Canada in the 19th century. The games of British soldiers and

immigrants to Canada, influenced by stick-and-ball games of First Nations, evolved to become a

game played on ice skates, often played with a puck, and played with sticks made by the Mi'kmaq of

Nova Scotia. The name of hockey itself has no clear origin, though the first known mention of theword 'hockey' in English dates to 1799 in England.

Snooker

Snooker is a cue sport that is played on a

large green baize-covered table with pockets

in each of the four corners and in the middle

of each of the long side cushions. A regular

(full-size) table is 12 6 ft (3.7 1.8 m). It is

played using a cue and snooker balls: onewhite cue ball, 15 red balls worth one point

each, and six balls of different colours: yellow

(2 points), green (3), brown (4), blue (5), pink

(6) and black (7). A player (or team) wins a

frame (individual game) of snooker by scoring

more points than the opponent(s), using the

cue ball to pot the red and coloured balls. A

player wins a match when a certain number of

frames have been won.

Snooker, generally regarded as having

been invented in India by British Armyofficers, is popular in many of the English-

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speaking and Commonwealth countries,with top professional players attaining multi-million pound

career earnings from the game. The sport is particularly and increasingly popular in China.

The game of snooker grew in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, and

by 1927 the first World Snooker Championship had been organised by Joe Davis who, as a

professional English billiards and snooker player, moved the game from a pastime activity into a

more professional sphere. Joe Davis won every world championship until 1946 when he retired. Thegame went into a decline through the 1950s and 1960s with little interest generated outside of those

who played. In 1959, Davis introduced a variation of the game, known as snooker plus, to try to

improve the game's popularity by adding two extra colours. However, it never caught on.

The UK Championship was first held in 1977 in Tower Circus, Blackpool as the United

Kingdom Professional Snooker Championship, an event open only to British residents and passport

holders.

Billiards

English billiards, called simply billiards inmany former British colonies and in Great Britain

where it originated, is a hybrid form of carom and

pocket billiards played on a billiard table.

Billiards is less well known as "the English

game", "the all-in game" and "the common

game".

The game is for two players or teams. Two

cue balls (originally both white and one marked

for example with a black dot, but more recently

one white, one yellow) and a red object ball areused. Each player or team uses a different cue

ball.

The first governing body of the game, the English Billiards Association, was formed in the UK

in 1885, a period that saw a number of sporting bodies founded across the British sporting world. By

the mid-20th century, the principal sanctioning body was the Billiards Association and Control

Council (later the Billiards and Snooker Control Council).

In the 19th century and up through the mid-1950s, a common way for championship titles to

change hands was by a challenge match. A challenge was issued to a championship title holder

accompanied by stake money ("acclamation") held by a third party. Up until the first organised

professional tournament in 1870, all English billiards champions were decided by challenge.

Curling

Curling is a sport in which players slide stones across a sheet of ice towards a target area. It is

related to bowls, boule and shuffleboard.

Two teams, each of four players, take turns sliding heavy, polished granite stones, also called

"rocks", across the ice curling sheet towards the house, a circular target marked on the ice. Each

team has eight stones. The purpose is to accumulate the highest score for a game, points being

scored for the stones resting closest to the centre of the house at the conclusion of each end, which is

completed when both teams have thrown all of their stones. A game may consist of ten or eight ends.

Curling is thought to have been invented in medieval Scotland, with the first written reference

to a contest using stones on ice coming from the records of Paisley Abbey.

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Evidence that curling existed in Scotland in the early 16th century includes a curling stone

inscribed with the date 1511 (uncovered along with another bearing the date 1551) when an old pond

was drained at Dunblane, Scotland.

In the early history of curling, the

playing stones (or rocks) were simply

flat-bottomed river stones that weresometimes notched or shaped; the

thrower, unlike those of today, had

little control over the stone, and relied

more on luck than on skill and

strategy.

Outdoor curling was very

popular in Scotland between the 16th

and 19th centuries, as the climates

provided good ice conditions every

winter. Scotland is home to the

international governing body for curling, the World Curling Federation, Perth, which originated as acommittee of the Royal Caledonian Curling Club, the mother club of curling.

Today, the game is most firmly established in Canada, having been taken there by Scottish

emigrants. The Royal Montreal Curling Club, the oldest established sports club still active in North

America.

In conclusion, the British people are very atached to sport, because they always want to be in

shape. They love to create and to inovate sports, to spread them around the world, and to import

them from other parts of the globe. United Kingdom has been and will be a sports-loving country

and is always among the first in the sports competitions, such as for example the Olympics,

Champions League in football and many other international gender competitions.

Dumitru Adrian-Viorel

Clasa a X-a L

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Sports in UK

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