SOME Antipodeans just can’t seem to accept that England won the rugby union World Cup. Hugh Morton, a statistician at Massey University in New Zealand, says his analysis of all 48 games shows that – surprise, surprise – his country’s own team, the All Blacks, was really the best performer, followed by Australia’s Wallabies, with the English coming in third.
Morton’s system for allocating points is strikingly different to the one used for the official rankings. Instead of giving a flat four points for a win, his system takes into account a variety of factors, such as whether a win was narrow or large, and whether the team…
