{"id":818,"date":"2017-11-24T18:43:27","date_gmt":"2017-11-24T18:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/?p=818"},"modified":"2019-02-09T11:15:19","modified_gmt":"2019-02-09T11:15:19","slug":"autumn-internationals-3-who-will-win-in-2017-week-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/autumn-internationals-3-who-will-win-in-2017-week-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Autumn Internationals #3 – Who will win in 2017? – Week 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

The third round of the Autumn Internationals take place this weekend and for nearly all nations that will be the end of the action.\u00a0 For the last two weeks<\/a>, 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 have worked out well with 11 out of the 12 matches involving 6 Nations teams correctly called.\u00a0 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My prediction model is explained in one of my 6 Nations post <\/a>but World Rugby’s goal is that rankings can be used as a predictive tool.\u00a0 The idea is to take each team’s current ranki\"\"ng and add 3 points to teams playing at home.\u00a0 Whoever has the higher ranking is then expected to win but the closer the rankings, the closer the game is expected to be.\u00a0 The current World Rugby rankings as of 23rd November 2017 is shown to the right along with their ranking points and the change (if any) from last week\u00a0 New Zealand are still number 1 with England 3 points behind them.\u00a0 Bear in mind that World Rugby add 3 points to a home team when predicting a match so this indicates that if England were to play New Zealand at Twickenham this month, it would be too close to call.\u00a0 Unfortunately, rugby fans have to wait until November next year to see that match by which time the rankings could have changed.<\/p>\n

The table below shows the results of week 1 & 2 and predictions for weeks 3 & 4.\u00a0 The ranking points are shown in the Pts columns next to each nation and the difference in rankings is represented by the horizontal bars in the middle which point to the stronger team.\u00a0 These teams are then listed in the last column as the predicted winners.<\/p>\n

For week 1, the only error was in predicting that Fiji would beat Italy<\/a> and this error is highlighted by the black background for the horizontal bars in between the two teams.\u00a0 I noticed that for this game the ranking gap was less than 6 points and in the 2017 6 Nations, all 3 errors (out of 15 games in total) came when the ranking gap was less than 6 points.\u00a0 So if I combine the first 2 weeks of the Autumn Internationals with the 6 Nations, out of 15 games where the ranking gap has been less than 6 points, I have been right in 11 of them whereas all 12 games with a ranking gap of more than 6 points have been correctly called.<\/p>\n

\"\"Despite getting all 6 games right in week 2<\/a>, my comment above about the 6 point ranking gap was put under some pressure.\u00a0 In the 3 close games, the actual winning margins were 24, 16 & 1 points which averages just under 14 points.\u00a0 In the 3 not so close games, the winning margins were 3, 5 & 7 points which averages at 5 points per game.\u00a0 In the case of Ireland & Wales, these nations chose to rest many first starters for a supposedly easier game which may explain why they came close to losing.<\/p>\n

On paper, week 3 has fewer closer games with only Scotland v Australia being too close to call.\u00a0 England v Samoa is the biggest mismatch and anything other than a big win for England will be regarded as a poor result.\u00a0 The other one to watch out for is France v Japan which might be closer than people think especially if France choose to rest some players.<\/p>\n

World Rugby update their rankings after every round of matches so whilst I can use the current rankings to predict the matches this weekend, I am on shaky grounds using them to predict 4th round of matches.\u00a0 I have done so in the table mainly to set expectations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The third round of the Autumn Internationals take place this weekend and for nearly all nations that will be the end of the action.\u00a0 For the last two weeks, 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 have worked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":819,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[59,14,12,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-818","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-archive","8":"tag-autumn-internationals","9":"tag-forecasts","10":"tag-rugby","11":"tag-sport-analytics","12":"entry","13":"override"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":822,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions\/822"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}