The second round of the Autumn Internationals take place tomorrow and some tasty matches await us.  Last week, I used World Rugby’s Rankings to predict who will win and to set expectations for each nation for the whole series and my predictions got off to a good start with 5 out of the 6 matches correctly called.  This performance is consistent with a similar set of predictions I made for the 2017 6 Nations where I correctly called 12 out of 15 games.

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It’s November again and for rugby fans, it means the Autumn Internationals are on us again.  The nations of Europe welcome teams from all over the world for the next 3 or 4 weeks to test each other and find out where they stand.  Ahead of the first round of matches, I have used World Rugby’s Rankings to predict who will win and to set expectations for each nation.

Earlier this year, I made a similar set of predictions for the 2017 6 Nations and correctly called 12 out of 15 games.  The prediction model is explained in one of my 6 Nations post but World Rugby’s goal is that rankings can be used as a predictive tool.  The idea is to take each team’s current ranking and add 3 points to teams playing at home.  Whoever has the higher ranking is then expected to win but clearly the closer the rankings, the closer the game is expected to be. [Read more…] about Autumn Internationals #1 – Who will win in 2017? – Week 1