Cricket knocks football for six

As the fifth and final Ashes test begins, cricket has overtaken football as the UK’s favourite sport online, new statistics show.

This Ashes series is the first time ever that more people are searching for ‘cricket’ than ‘football’, according to web monitoring company Hitwise.

Data for the past two months shows searches for ‘cricket’ initially overtook ‘football’ searches during the first Ashes test, in the week ending 23 July. Though cricket searches then dropped the following week, England’s increasingly promising performances have since pushed online interest to greater heights.

Cricket-related searches peaked at a massive 55 per cent greater than searches for football during the 3rd Ashes test at Old Trafford.

In addition to the increase in cricket searches since the beginning of the Ashes, traffic to cricket websites has continued to perform strongly.

Over the past week, traffic to the sector has grown by 10 per cent.

The top cricket site remains CricInfo (www.cricinfo.com), which claims 35 per cent of all cricket traffic and is the second most popular destination for online searches on the term ‘cricket’. The top destination is BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk), whilst Channel 4 (www.channel4.com), which is televising the Ashes series, is in third position.