Is it just me or has the world of rugby gone completely mad since the Boks ground out a 15-6 win over the Red Roses in possibly the least entertaining RWC Final to date?
I will of course give the Springboks their dues and congratulate them on beating not only England, but also Argentina and rugby powerhouse Fiji in their dream run to the trophy and in doing so becomming the second most successful nation at the Rugby World Cup.
This week has been all about handing out accolades to the South Africans, and it’s good to see that in addition to being crowned the ‘World Champions’, they have been named ‘IRB Team of the Year’, Bryan Habana has taken out ‘IRB player of the Year’, Jake White ‘IRB Coach of the Year’ and they have climbed to Number 1 on the official IRB rankings! Surely it’s only a matter of time before they are crowned ‘Greatest team ever to play rugby’, not to mention ‘Immortals’ and ‘Intergalactic Champions’.
Team of the Year
Personally, I believe this title should be awarded to a standout team for the year as a whole, rather than winning their last three games. Clearly the All Blacks were a standout in 2007 as this table shows.
It’s interesting to note that despite playing 2 fewer games the Kiwi’s ran in 1/3 more tries while only letting in 2/3rds as many.
Wallabies defence matched that of the Kiwi’s however gave away more penalties
Number One Ranking
I’ve long been a critic of the IRB’s team ranking system, which is essentailly a points swapping system between teams matched to a curve, but never more so than after reading this caveat:
RWC matches count for double in the IRB World Rankings and a team can gain 1.5 times the standard amount if they win by more than 15 points.
So the Boks overtaking the Blacks massive lead in a matter of weeks was due to several events occuring, all of which were doubled during RWC rankings time.
- France lost to lowly ranked Argentina at home, causing them to plummet and Argies to shoot up rankings
- New Zealand lost to lowly ranked France causing a big points drop
- Argies beat Ireland giving them another favourable boost
- South Africa beat the now highly ranked Argies by 15+ getting 3 times the usual rankings bonus
- South Africa beat Poms getting 2 times usual bonus
For the Boks to be called number 1 team despite having in the last 12 months a 100% failure record against the All Blacks in addition to losses against Australia, Ireland and England is just a little crazy. Perhaps they should beat the All Blacks (at least in SA, they’re too good at home) before talking it up too much.
Well done to Habana on player of the year, he would have got some tough competition from Sheridan, Matfield, Hernandez, Delasau and Tuqiri the try scoring machine.
