Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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6 Nations History #1 – The men’s story so far in 2021

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The 2021 Six Nations (Men’s) ended with Wales winning the title after Scotland beat France in Paris to snuff out France’s attempt to win the title for the first time since 2010.  Wales let a Grand Slam slip after conceding a try in injury time and as an England fan who was there at Wembley in 1999 I know exactly how the Welsh feel!

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Rugby World Cup #3 – Who will win in 2019? – Model Evaluation

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After 43 matches with 37 correctly predicted, the stage is set for an epic final between England & South Africa to settle the 2019 Rugby World Cup (Men’s).  Ahead of making a prediction for that match, I have examined my model in depth and in this post I explore whether or not the model needs to be adjusted.

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Rugby World Cup #2 – Who will win in 2019? – Knockout Round

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It’s the quarter finals tomorrow and it’s time for me to predict the outcomes using World Rugby’s rankings.  Although I got 33 out of 37 matches right in the pool stages, the 4 errors are enough to change my prediction of who will win.

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Rugby World Cup #1 – Who will win in 2019? – Pool Stage

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Augustin Pichot, vice-president of World Rugby, may not like its ranking system but ahead of the 2019 Rugby World Cup (Men’s), I have been able to use rankings to correctly predict 80% of international matches since 2017.  For the world cup that starts this week, I used a dynamic ranking model to predict all matches and it shows that 4 countries cannot be separated for the trophy so we are in for some very exciting matches!

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6 Nations #12 – Who will win in 2018? – Week 5

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We now know the answer to who will win the 2018 6 Nations Championship.  Ireland won the title with a match to spare after England failure against France resulted in my second forecasting error of the championship.  There is still much to play for though in the last week with the main question being whether England do to Ireland what Ireland did to England last year and stop them from winning a Grand Slam.  Whilst I am cheering on England, it is St. Patricks Day and I do have some Irish blood in me so part of me does wish Ireland well.

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6 Nations #10 – Who will win in 2018? – Week 3

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After two weeks of the 2018 6 Nations, all 6 of my match predictions have been correct.  Whilst this might be vindication of the World Rugby ranking model, the last thing we want in sport is a perfect prediction model otherwise what’s the point?  Where would be the excitement of watching sport live?  So I am hoping for an incorrect prediction soon …

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6 Nations #8 – Who will win in 2018? – Week 1

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The 2018 6 Nations begins tomorrow and fans will be looking forward to a feast of rugby for the next two months.  As always, pundits galore are making their predictions and the one thing we can count on is that some will have egg on their faces by the time it is over.  In 2017, I used World Rugby’s Rankings to predict who would win each match in the 6 Nations and the Autumn Internationals and these predictions worked out well with 12 out of 15 6 Nations games and 15 out of the 19 Autumn International matches involving 6 Nations teams correctly called.

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