Tag Archives: world ranking

Tonga are still a long shot for the 2021 World Cup

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After a dominating win over Great Britain, followed by a tough and exciting win over Australia, some extremely exuberant pundits decided that Tonga were the best nation in the world and worthy of Tier 1 status.

Putting aside the fact that a poor island nation of 100,000 is not capable of generating enough native talent to compete with Australia or England and so not at all suitable for Tier 1 status, I find it hard to believe that two wins is enough to reach the top of the rugby league pile. Then the IRL updated their rankings and put New Zealand at number one. It all got too much for me.

Fortunately, the draw for the 2021 World Cup restored some sanity, despite the slightly incongruous setting of Buckingham Palace and newsworthy presence of the Duke of Sussex. With 641 days to kickoff, I got a bit excited and looked at next year’s tournament.

Embed from Getty Images

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Primer – Introducing Pythago World Rankings

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While the recent RLWC was on, I couldn’t help but notice that the RLIF had Scotland pegged as the world’s fourth best team. Scotland hadn’t won a game since 2014 and even that was against Ireland. Since then, they’d lost to Australia, England, Ireland, Wales and France. I also got frustrated because a fifteen second Google didn’t reveal how the rankings are actually calculated.

So I figured I could come up with a better system. I did and this is how the Pythago World Rankings (PWR) work.

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