No doubt at some point this weekend during the England vs Italy game you will hear someone say "Italy aren't as good as they used to be", you may even say it yourself and with no six nations win for more than 4 years (28th Feb 2015) its possibly quite hard to disagree with. But is it true? So are Italy getting better or getting worse? First of all lets look at the IRB world rankings; Italy are currently ranked 14th in the world, behind Georgia, Tonga and Japan. Undoubtedly some of the feeling that Italy haven't progressed is that until Jan 2012 they were ranked above each of those Nations and fairly closely parallelled Scotland's ranking. One thing however is clear, Italy's total ranking points haven't really changed much since their inception in 2004, this however is partly due to the way the rankings are calculated , as the IRB use a "points exchange" system meaning when a team wins a game they take points from the other team. However ...
Bringing together two of my favourite things in life Data Analysis and Sport. This blog is an attempt to try and provide some answers to questions some of which are important, but most are trivial.