England: Number 1 in the world?

Men's rugby has had official international rankings now for years. A fiendishly complex statistical calculation is used, but the result is something that supposedly removes all argument about who is better than who. It also arguably adds an extra spice to games, an extra encouragement to play internationals in order to move up the table. It cannot do any harm to a sport if you can show that your national team is in the top 10 or 20 in the world.

Women's rugby has no such ranking. There are all kinds of arguments why this would be, like there being fewer games, but many of the teams in the men's ranking hardly have a full fixture programme so the real reason is probably more a lack of interest or effort on the part of the IRB.

So it is interesting to see that a rugby enthusiast/statistician in France has now stepped in to the breach and produced a detailed ranking for all women's international teams - the first ever produced by anyone. The methodology is complex, and may be debatable at the margins, but the result is interesting and - considering we have a Frenchman giving an English team top billing! - unbiased. After yesterday's games the top ten are...

• 1 England 3963 points
• 2 New Zealand 3928
• 3 France 3625
• 4 Canada 3612
• 5 Wales 3449
• 6 United States 3387
• 7 Ireland 3340
• 8 Scotland 3231
• 9 Australia 3028
• 10 Spain 2840

It is also interestingly the rankings are close (but not quite identical) to the IRB's seeding for the World Cup.

While on the subject of the World Cup, were you planning to got to the final in September? If so it may be an idea to ensure you get tickets early. The RFU have now confirmed that the crowd was over 12,500 for a friendly fixture on a cold, wet winter's evening yesterday at Twickenham. Quite how many there will be for the World Cup Final on a warm summer's afternoon next September can only be guessed, but its worth bearing in mind that the absolute capacity of The Stoop is barely a thousand or so more than yesterday's crowd. You have been warned!