Explanation for the puzzling World Cup rugby draw

The 2023 World Cup rugby tournament has entered the quarter-final knock out stage and one thing that had puzzled me all along was the draw that placed the 20 teams that started out into four groups (called ‘pools’), in which the five teams in each pool that would play every other team, with the top two going to the quarter-final stage. You would expect that the teams would be seeded so that the top eight teams would be split equally among the four groups in such a way that, in the absence of upsets, the top four would meet in the semi-finals and the top two would meet in the finals.

But when you looked at the pools, you see that pool A had France (#2) and New Zealand (#4), while pool B had Ireland (#1), South Africa (#3), and Scotland (#5), pool C had Wales (#6) and Fiji (#8) along with Australia (#9), while pool D had just England (#6). (These rankings were those just before the current tournament started and may have changed as a result of the matches already played.) As a result, Scotland did not qualify for the last eight, even though they are ranked #5, because their pool B also had the two of the top three teams of Ireland and South Africa. Even though England is ranked lower than Scotland at #6, they easily made it to the quarter-finals. Their toughest opponent is when they meet Fiji in the quarter-finals and the first time they have to play any team that is higher ranked than them, assuming they get by Fiji, is in the semi-finals.
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Fiji-Portugal thriller in rugby World Cup

The final pool game in the preliminary rounds of the 2023the World Cup was a thriller between the favorites Fiji and Portugal, the latter having never won a game at the World Cup. The lead kept switching constantly until during the very last moments, Portugal scored a try and converted from a difficult angle to give them a historic 24-23 victory.

You can see the highlights.

You would never guess from the scenes of wild jubilation among the Portuguese players and fans and the dejection of the Fijians that it was the latter team that advanced to the quarter finals while Portugal was eliminated. This was because as Fiji got a losing bonus point for the margin of defeat being seven points or less, their points score in their pool was tied for second with Australia but since Australia had lost to them in their earlier contest, the tie-breaker favored Fiji.

The four quarter-final games will be played next Saturday and Sunday with Fiji playing England on Sunday. England had the easiest pool opponents and has not really been tested so far, so this will be an interesting game. The other quarter-final games will be Wales v. Argentina and Ireland v. New Zealand on Saturday, and France v. South Africa on Sunday. Those last two matchups involve the four top teams in the tournament.

Running up the score

I am not a fan of American football but one nice tradition they have is that, at least at the college level, it is considered bad form to run up the score on your opponents once the game has been effectively decided. This is because there is no tangible benefit in college games to having a huge margin of victory. Rubbing the opponent’s noses in the dirt is frowned upon and even though it does happen, coaches who do that tend to be criticized. So once a win is assured, coaches tend to take out their top players and give the second and third string players some playing time and do not try as hard to score more.

However, in the World Rugby Cup being played in France, the rules do favor lopsided scores during the preliminary group stage. This is because when it comes to qualifying for the quarter-final knockout stage, only the top two teams from each of the four groups of five teams can make it, and hence you need some tie-breaker rules if two teams happen to have the same number of points based on wins and bonus points. And almost all those tie-breaker rules depend upon the number of points and tries scored by each side. So running up the score is a form of insurance in case you depend upon tie-breakers to see if you qualify for the second stage.

As a result, we have had some enormously lop-sided results, mostly at the expense of Namibia and Romania. Namibia lost 52-8 to Italy, 71-3 to New Zealand, and 96-0 to France. Romania lost 82-8 to Ireland and 76-0 to South Africa.

In general, I watch just the highlights after each game is over but I had no desire to see Namibia and Romania humiliated like this so I skipped those games. Close games are much more interesting.

Winning ugly in rugby

In rugby, there is a style of game that is attractive to watch and that is where a team advances by passing the ball back and forth among teammates while running, and even when there is a breakdown due to a dropped pass or a tackle, quickly launch a second or even third phase by getting the ball out to its fast running backs. This attacking style is fun to watch.

Then there is the slower defensive game where the burly forwards dominate and ground is gained slowly with the ball frequently obscured by the masses of players converged on it and piled on top of one another, with the referee then blowing the whistle for a penalty or to start a set piece scrum. This game is definitely not as exciting to watch but is often the option chosen when playing in rain and the ground is muddy that makes the ball and ground slippery and the fast passing game difficult to pull off. Some teams choose the dour defensive game as a strategy even when the weather conditions do not require it

Robert Kitson clearly prefers the fast game and he chides England for playing ‘robotic’ rugby against Japan in the current World Cup, when they scored all of their 27 points by penalties and drop goals, all kicked by their incredibly accurate fly half George Ford. Kitson says that Portugal (who lost to Wales) and Uruguay (who lost to France) and Fiji (who also lost to Wales) are playing better rugby even as they lost to higher ranked teams.

While fans of rugby who have no strong partisan allegiances will clearly prefer the fast, open style because it is so entertaining, those who are ardent supporters of their team will undoubtedly prefer an ugly win to a pretty loss.

My high school team in Sri Lanka consistently had one of the best school rugby teams in the country. For a few years they had a coach who carried the desire for fast, attacking play to the extreme. The players were forbidden from doing the standard defensive move of kicks to touch to relieve pressure even when they were deep in their own territory or even behind their own goal line. They always had to run and pass the ball. This gave their opponents chances to win ugly because since they knew that our team would not kick the ball to touch, they could anticipate better what our team would do and move their own defensive players into attacking positions.

So while my school team was the most fun to watch, and they won a lot because the coach was very talented in teaching them how to play this type of game and motivating them to do so, they were vulnerable to opponents who executed a careful game plan that could exploit the lack of defensive plays.

Fiji beats Australia for the first time in Rugby World Cup

Fiji caused a major upset at the World Cup being played in France when they defeated Australia 22-15 in their group match.

It was not just Fiji’s first win against Australia in the World Cup, but their first of any sort at all since they beat them by two points at the SCG way back in 1954. Given that, the surprising thing was Australia never looked close to winning this one.

You can see the highlights.

I will not try to explain the rules of rugby, except that scoring a touchdown (also known as a ‘try’) gets you five points. If it is followed by a conversion, you get a further two points. A penalty goal or a drop goal gets you three points.

But the tournament has an interesting scoring system. It gives four points for a win, two points for a tie, and zero points for a loss. But to encourage teams to try to get points by scoring tries (which are more exciting) instead of penalty goals, a team gets a bonus point if it scores four or more tries in a game. But even more interesting is that a losing team can get a bonus point if the margin of their defeat is seven points or less. So in the case of the Wales-Fiji game that Wales won 32-26, Fiji got two points even though they lost: one point for scoring four tries and another for losing by just six points.

There are three teams from the central Polynesian archipelago region among the twenty playing in the tournament and they represent by far the nations with the smallest populations. Fiji has about 900,000, Samoa has about 200,000, and Tonga has just 100,000. That they can manage to field teams that can compete at the top level with countries that have far greater populations says something about the quality of their rugby programs. I noticed that some of the other teams also had players with Polynesian names on their squads, that further shows the strength of the Polynesian rugby traditions.

Rugby players and referees

The 2023 Rugby World Cup tournament is currently underway in France. Here are highlights from the first weekend, showing all the tries (touchdowns) that were scored.

One thing that always impresses me in rugby is how a single referee (aided by two touch judges on the sidelines for specific roles) controls such a fast moving game with 30 players. The refs are aided by the strict code of conduct that forbids players arguing with them, so you see nothing like the ugly scenes in American football (or other professional sports) where players and even coaches argue over calls. This is not because rugby players are innately courteous to the refs. It is because in rugby, respect for the referee is instilled into players from the beginning.
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American is a land of many happy returns

I hate shopping. Whenever I go to a store, I tend to be overwhelmed by the variety before me and so my strategy, when I cannot avoid shopping, is to decide in advance exactly what I want and go in and buy it and get out of the store in the shortest possible time. I particularly hate shopping for clothes so I tend to wear the same clothes over and over until they start to fall apart and then I try to buy exactly the same thing (brand name, size, color, style, etc.) to replace the item. This is not easy because it seems like most people don’t want to wear the same clothes repeatedly and so manufacturers keep changing things. So when I find an item I like, I sometimes buy more than one item just to spare myself a later shopping trip.

The advent of online shopping has been a boon for people like me because it spares me having to search through racks of items looking for just what I want. But even here there are problems. Recently I needed to buy a pair of shoes because the shoes I wore were developing holes in the bottom through which water would seep if the ground was wet. I currently have a pair that leaks that I wear only on dry days. (Yes, I wear the same pair of shoes over and over, with a spare pair handy if the occasion requires me to wear something better than my shabby pair.) I found the identical pair online at the Target department store in the same size and color and so ordered it. But when it arrived, I found to my consternation that it was too large. So I had to take it to the store to exchange it, that required looking through the racks to find a size that fit me, which was a full size smaller than my previous pair. So either my feet have got smaller (unlikely) or the manufacturer’s sizes have changed.
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Breaking things and risking lives for entertainment

There are huge swathes of American pop culture that I am only vaguely aware of and it usually takes some item in the news or an article that draws me in to learn more about it. One of these happened recently involves so-called ‘Monster Trucks’, something that had long been on the periphery of my consciousness. An article in the August 21, 2023 issue of the New Yorker took me into that particular world and made me take a look at some videos of what goes on at these events that draw huge crowds. The following video shows the highlights of the 2023 season. It runs for over an hour but you get the general idea after a few minutes.


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Bizarre coda to Rubiales controversy

Over the next few days, there will be little or no blog posts as I will be a little busy with other things.

However, I had to say something about the bizarre coda to the controversy about the Spanish soccer chief Luis Rubiales and his forcible kissing of a player on the World Cup winning Spanish soccer team.

It appears that his mother is vowing to go on a hunger strike to protest the way her son is being treated.

In a desperate move, the mother of Spain’s football chief has locked herself in a church in southern Spain and declared a hunger strike, as prosecutors open an investigation into his conduct.

A week after Luis Rubiales, the president of the Spanish Football Federation, kissed Spain’s Jenni Hermoso at the Women’s World Cup awards ceremony, his reputation is in tatters and his future hangs in the balance.

In a desperate attempt to defend her son, Ángeles Béjar, Rubiales’ mother, locked herself in the Divina Pastora church in Motril, southern Spain, and declared a hunger strike.

She won’t stop, she says, until the authorities find a solution to the “inhuman and bloody hunt they are conducting against my son with something he doesn’t deserve”.
…

Rubiales’s mother told the Spanish news agency EFE that she would remain in the church “day and night” and on strike “indefinitely” until justice is done for her son.

The woman remained in the parish church with her sister after the priest left.

Luis Rubiales’ mother has asked Jenni Hermoso to “tell the truth” and “maintain the version she had at the beginning of the incident”.

One has to admire the devotion of a mother to her son but a hunger strike? Really? These are usually done to highlight a grave injustice and provoke widespread anger. But the plight of a beleaguered highly entitled sports bureaucrat is hardly the thing that spurs mass sympathy. And is her son going to let his mother fall ill and even die just so that he can keep his job?

I think that she is only making herself and her son look ridiculous.