Sports play an important role in British life. The most popular sport is football. Cricket is also popular in England, but is less important in the other home nations. Rugby union and rugby league are the other major team sports. Tennis is the most important sport for the two weeks of the Wimbledon Championships(温布尔登网球锦标赛) Football The modern global game of football developed from traditional British football games in the 19th century. Club football is organized separately in each of the home nations. English football has a league system which combines thousands of clubs. Scotland has a similar but smaller club football structure. The top level league in Wales is the league of Wales. In Northern Ireland the main league is the Irish Football League. Each season the most successful clubs from each of the home nations qualify for(使…具有…的资格) the two Europe wide club competitions organized by UEFA(欧足联), the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Cup. Cricket Cricket was invented in England. It is regarded as England’s national summer game and it is probably the second most widely covered sport. There are eighteen professional country clubs, seventeen of them in England and one in Wales. Each summer the country clubs compete in the first class Country Championship, which consist of two leagues of nine teams and in which matches are played over four days. Rugby Like football, rugby union and rugby league both developed from traditional British football games in the 19th century. For much of the 20th century there was great antagonism between rugby leagues, which was a mainly working class game based in the industrial areas of northern England, and rugby union, which is a mainly middle class game in England, and is also popular in the other home nations. Tennis Tennis is yet another sport which originated in the United Kingdom and the governing body of the sport is the LTA(草地网球协会). However, no British man has won Wimbledon since 1936 and no British woman since 1977. The only British players of either sex to reach the world top 50 in recent years are Greg Rusedski, who learnt his tennis in Canada, and Tim Henman and Andrew Murray ,who did not pass through the LTA system either. 小题1:What do we know about football?
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