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Cricket World Cup final England vs New Zealand: finally again world power!
This Sunday, for the first time in 14 years, an international match of the English national cricket team will be broadcast on free-to-air television. The pay-TV channel "Sky" allows the public service "Channel 4" at short notice the broadcast.
It's not just any game: England and New Zealand face each other at the Lord's Cricket Ground in London, the oldest and most beautiful cricket stadium in the World Cup final. For both teams, the twelfth edition of the tournament would be the first title. England, the motherland of cricket, where the first match was held in 1787, wants to end a series of defeats at world championships with a final victory, which can almost compete with the national football team.
Reuters / Paul Childs
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In 1992, the English last reached the final, then was always prematurely end. Low points were the home World Cup 1999 and the World Cup four years ago, when the highly-placed team retired in each of the preliminary round.
When it comes down to it, England plays best
This time, the host and world number one has lived up to his role as a favorite. The team did in the first round again hard and lost three of nine games. But when it came down to it, the team was there: The last two preliminaries against India and New Zealand, as the progress was on the verge, England won sovereign.
Cricket for beginners
The game
In the Cricket World Cup a game is set to 50 overs per team. An over consists of six throws. In total, a team has 300 litters. Conversely, this means that your opponent has 300 chances to score points with his strokes.
The teams
Each team consists of eleven players. From the team that has the right to vote, there are always two batsmen on the court, who take turns. If one batsman leaves, the next one moves forward. If the throwing team succeeds in kicking out ten batsmen, the innings are over before the end of all 300 throws. While a player throws, the other ten players of his team spread out in the field and try to catch the beaten ball.
The points
Only the team that has the right to strike can score points (runs). When the batsman hits the thrown ball, he tries to change places with his partner on the other side of the field. They have as much time for it as the opponents need to bring the ball back to the wicket. There is a run for every exchange. There are four points if the beaten ball flies over the field boundaries, but it comes up once before. Six points will be credited if the ball hits just beyond the Spiefeldbegrenzung.
The throw
If the thrower's ball leaves his hand, the arm must be fully stretched according to cricket rules. Mostly, the players throw so that the ball comes up in front of the batsman once. There are bowlers who set the pace and accelerate the ball to 160 km / h. And there are so-called spin bowlers who give the ball a spin and make it difficult to calculate.
The departure
The aim of the bowlers is to throw out the batsmen or to give them at least as few points. There are different possibilities for this. The most important: 1. The bowler throws past the batsman and hits the wicket. 2. The batsman hits the ball and tries to swap positions with his partner. In the meantime, the throwing team brings the ball back and destroys the wicket. 3. The batsman hits the ball but a player of the throwing team catches the ball before touching the ground for the first time.
In the semi-final, the team around captain Eoin Morgan outclassed the defending champion and world champion Australia, who had won four of the past five World Cups. The success was above all the merit of the two bowlers Jofra Archer and Adil Rashid. They eliminated five of the ten Australian batsmen with their throws alone and contributed to Australia's 223 runs. The British batsmen surpassed this value after less than two thirds of their innings.
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Final opponent New Zealand is a blatant outsider in the final. But in this role, the "Black Caps" feel most comfortable: So they defeated in a dramatic semi-finals, which was held due to a rainstorm on two days, the clear favorite India. This has made the five-million-nation population for the second time in a row in the World Cup final.
For England, the tournament also has a political component amidst the Brexit chaos. Success would encourage all those Englishmen who see the beginning of the resurrection of the British Empire in the EU exit. After all, the cricket world championship is nothing more than a sporting showdown for Britain with its former colonies. And now a world title just in the year of Brexit can prove the superiority of the Englishman to the Commonwealth states on the cricket field. European countries were not even in the tournament.
Pay TV brings money, but costs young talent
The English cricket association ECB hopes that a World Cup victory in their own country will boost English cricket. Because the sport is in crisis. And that is closely linked to the fact that all international matches have been on pay-TV for a decade and a half. When England played against Australia in 2005, nearly three million people watched on Channel 4. On pay TV, this time around, there were only about 300,000.
In 2006, according to the sports association, almost 200,000 Englishmen played cricket at least once a week, ten years later it was a quarter less. In the county of Hampshire alone, 40 clubs have given up over the past few years, according to "Guardian", because they no longer get enough players together. Because in the meantime a whole generation grew up on television largely without cricket, there is a lack of identification figures.
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In addition, the ECB has so far been insufficient to integrate the descendants of the millions of immigrants from South Asia and the Caribbean. Observers blame the clubs, whose history is sometimes centuries ago and whose conservative leaders would therefore have no interest in offensively approaching British or Pakistani-born Britons. At the World Cup, the stadium atmosphere resembled an away game in England's games against India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. To change that, the association launched a "South Asian Action Plan" last year.
A new professional league is to save cricket in England
The ECB is even hoping for a new professional league, which will start in the summer of 2020. Under the name "The Hundred" eight teams from London, Manchester, Birmingham and other big cities compete against each other. They play a faster and easier version of cricket, where each team has a maximum of 100 casts altogether - at the World Cup, there are up to 300 per team.
Purists wrinkle their noses and suspect that this game has little to do with cricket. However, the association hopes to make cricket cool again and to get a young audience into the sport - because the rules are more understandable and games do not last the whole day. To attract families, the Cricket Association has even brought the Disney Group and an event agency on board. In addition, the BBC broadcasts selected games live.
In India and Australia, comparable leagues have been a public runner for years. Tens of millions of fans follow the games on television and streams, the average attendance in the stadiums is higher than that in Spanish or Italian Premier League football.
"The Hundred" is said to lead cricket in England to similar heights. Best with the world title in the back.