Rugby World Cup 2011: the last eight
The pool phase in New Zealand has arguably been a matter of separating the men from the boys.
Few adolescent heads were raised, notably Tonga, who missed the quarter finals by 2 pts, the narrowest margin for the third-placed teams, but the august hierarchy of rugby has sailed through intact.
The last 8 XVs are also the top eight in the IRB World Ranking.
What about the semi-finalists then? In true GSN spirit, we have played our own fantasy quarter finals, by the yardstick of an “efficiency indicator” calculated as: game points difference (pts. for minus against) x pool points earned.
It’s a rough indication of efficiency, which however yields few surprises, as per the numbers below (the efficiency indicator in brackets):
South Africa (2.556) betas Australia (1.875)
New Zealand (3.820) hammers Argentina (700).
One can play around with numbers (see our predictions mid way through the pool phase: we got Scotland badly wrong!) but there is a major caveat: that the quarter finals will be as much about efficiency as about bottle. And there are no measures for fighting spirit other than the result on the pitch.
And what about Dan Carter being out?
Finally, the Rugby Global Cup 2011: Great Britain has two teams into the last eight, and their main contenders for Global Cup supremacy, New Zealand and South Africa, have a very good chance of ousting GBR from the GSN top spot.
