WHICH sport is the world's favourite? The answer, football, feels so self-evident that it is barely worth a post. But what about the world's second favourite?

In 2005 England was in the thrall of a glorious cricketing summer. That year's Ashes series, a biennial battle in which Australia used to thrash England (before gloating about it insufferably), was going to the wire. Five wonderfully close Test matches had brought the country to a standstill. (It even knocked The World's Favourite Sport off of the back pages for a while.)

Out of curiosity, I checked out the American press to see whether news of this parochial clash obsessing England had made it across the pond. It was with pride that I saw that it had made the New York Times (ifa billion people have watched a single sporting-related event was the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, according to futures sport+entertainment, a consultancy. In fact it is the most-watched TV programme of all time. Still, I don't think a cutesy Chinese kid lip-synching a sickly song about how the world is one happy family really counts as sport.

Kevin Alavy, the director of futures sport+entertainment, says that “broadly speaking, the FIFA World Cup and the Summer Olympics are by far the two most-watched sporting events, with the UEFA European Championships ranked third. There's then quite a large gap to…the FIA Formula One World Championship, NFL Super Bowl and the IOC Winter Olympics.”

So where does cricket fit in? By these figures it seems preposterous to advance it as