Rugby World Cup Simulation

World Cup's have been like London buses this year and the rugby union version kicks off in a week or so.

It's live and complete on terrestrial TV in the UK, with plenty of huge mismatches in the opening group games, before eight teams, (whom could be fairly accurately predicted beforehand) hold the really interesting knockout run to the Webb Ellis Trophy on November 2nd.

However, that's not to say that the group matches don't hold any intrigue. There are at least two tier one teams in each of the four groups and while they'll be expected to steamroller the lower grade group opponents, the outcomes of these elite matchup will have a huge bearing on how the pairings for the knockout phase pans out.

Therefore, if you want to chart the likelihood of a team's route to the final being paved with Southern hemisphere behemoths, a tournament simulation is the easiest method out there.

You'll need a ratings system to kickoff with, assuming you're shunning the merry-go-round that has been the world rankings. Ireland are the current leaders, having recently displaced Wales, who had just displaced New Zealand, who themselves had displaced South Africa....ten years ago.

So the world rankings, following a decade of stagnation have suddenly become volatile.

Let's make our own, instead.

I took the last 20 matches for all participants, and produced an attacking and defensive rating, based around match scores and opponent quality.

New Zealand are the tournament's most potent attack, they'll score around 14 more points against and average team than another average team would manage and Wales, courtesy of rugby league knowhow, has the best defence.

Next you need a way to simulate game outcomes.

The big clash of the group stages sees favourites New Zealand take on South Africa. After matching up the respective attacking and defensive ratings for each team, the model expects the All Blacks to average around 28.5 points and S Africa 23.5.

New Zealand are favoured by five points and there's likely to be 52 total points.

If we look at the spread of points scored and allowed by each side over the last year or so, we can produce a distribution of points that describes each team's likely scoring pattern in this game. We'll then draw a value randomly from this distribution for each team to simulate a single match scoreline and then repeat the process thousands of times.

After adding a few tweaks to mimic the largely redundant bonus points system rugby insists on employing and ensuring that each drawn score from the distributions is a "rugby score" (no scoring a grand total of four points etc), we just repeat for every group game, add up the total points won in the group, follow the draw format and find the winner.

This is how the simulations shake out.

Four sides with a double figure percentage chance of lifting the trophy, New Zealand, S Africa for the south and England and Wales for the north, with the former looking a vulnerable favourite.