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England's women won the Cricket World Cup yesterday, but you might not have heard about it

Picture:
Picture:
Getty Images: Stu Forster

On Sunday, England won the women's cricket world cup, beating India by nine runs, with the final scores finshing as 228/7 to 219/10.

But did you know about it?

England's women took home the trophy for the fourth time in the tournament's 40-year history, the third time that they had done so on home soil.

Sadly, it seems that UK interest in the competition barely registered.

UK search traffic for the competition was low throughout the tournament.

Although the UK ranked third of countries in the world on Google for use of the search term 'Cricket World Cup', the traffic was only 9 per cent of that from Pakistan, the country that engaged the most with the World Cup on the search engine - given that the tournament was hosted in England, this could have been higher.

Engagement declined further as the tournament continued. In the last seven days, the UK was only the 14th most interested country in the world in the tournament - the greatest proportion of searches coming from India.

Overall, UK engagement was only 9 per cent of that of their finalist rivals. British traffic rose to 10 per cent of that from India in the 24 hours following the English win.

In comparison to the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships held earlier this month, the numbers are minimal.

Despite only lasting a fortnight in comparison to the World Cup's four weeks, Wimbledon consistently outperformed the cricket competition, often being searched 50 times more often and more throughout the month, even in the days after the tournament ended on 16 July.

The majority of Wimbledon search enquiries consistently came from the UK, followed by Ireland who searched 'Wimbledon' 64 per cent as often.

20 July, when India beat Australia in their semi-final, and the 24 hours following the final on 23 July were the only occasions that World Cup received more worldwide search traffic than the tennis competition - after it had ended.

As well as this low online engagement, several people, including an MP, took to Twitter to call out disappointing attendance, highlighting the number of MCC members who did not attend the Lords final.

MP for Ilford South, Mike Gapes tweeted:

MCC member Paul Manski also criticised his colleagues for leaving the Pavillion empty:

Note: Google Trends operates its statistics in terms of a proportion of all searches, rather than absolute search numbers.

According to the service "a tiny country where 80 per cent of the queries are for 'bananas' will get twice the score of a giant country where only 40 per cent of the queries are for 'bananas'".

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