World Rugby League

I started this blog as a way to publish a few thoughts and home-brewed statistics about football, but I think that one of the ideas I put forward could work for rugby too, so here it is: a very simple league table made in the most traditional way there is: by compiling the last two games played by the participating sides against each other, in this case the world's top 14 rugby teams. Since draws are quite rare in rugby, I haven't bothered with number of points for a win or bonus points for types of victory. A win is a win is a win. The result doesn't look too different from the official world rankings, but at least this one has a consistent, fair, easy-to-understand basis. As of 7 February 2023:

I'm not a rugby expert at all, but thirteen games seems to be a fairly doable number for each of these international sides to play every twelve months, so why not play each other once a year? The Northern Hemisphere already has a yearly tournament in the Six Nations and the Southern in the four-team Rugby Championship, so why not add four more teams (Samoa, Tonga, Fiji and Japan), and play it as a single global round-robin tournament? You wouldn't even have to scrap the Six Nations or the Rugby Championship: they could still be played inside this global tournament, in the same way that the Calcutta Cup, for example, is contested as part of the Six Nations. After tallying all the results up, you can still give awards for the best team in each Hemisphere and proclaim a Six Nations champion, a Rugby Championship winner, a wooden-spooner, etc. Also, you could introduce promotion and relegation, so that the 14th team changes every year. As the table stands, that's bad news to Tonga, but hey, maybe you could soften the blow by having the bottom team play off against the best from anywhere else in the world for the right to compete among the top nations the following year. Meanwhile, the remaining 13 teams could be using that play-off international date to play one team each outside of the Top 14. If rugby really is serious about developing other nations, nothing does more for the cause than inviting the best in the world to play against those other countries just bubbling under the surface. The kids attending those games one day will be answering questions in the future saying that they really got their desire to play rugby on that day when New Zealand, or England, or South Africa, came to play my nation and I became... hooked.

So, does rugby have 14-15 dates a year to play internationals? That's for them to decide. If not, maybe the top division could be trimmed to 12, but that would mean losing a couple of deserving teams every season.

As for logistics, especially travelling and venues, that's for someone else to decide. Maybe small groups of three or four so that over 12-14 days they play one another at one of the participant countries? For example, England, Italy, Japan and Australia playing each other in Japan, while Scotland, France, Argentina and South Africa play in South Africa, while Ireland, Wales, Fiji and New Zealand play in Ireland? Something like that. I know that matches involving the smaller Pacific teams (Tonga, Fiji and Samoa) are difficult to organise due to a variety of issues, both economic and otherwise, but if there is a will there will be a way. The Six Nations and the Rugby Championship have got big because they have been doggedly playing every year, and the World Cup has captured everybody's imagination in a very short time of existence. If this idea is implemented with vigour and insisting on it every year, it will become great and memorable very quickly.