Tag: uruguay

I was starting to wonder where an upset was going to come from. The first eight games of this Rugby World Cup have gone pretty much to script, with results falling in line with World Rugby’s rankings, and margins of victory being corresponding well with predictions. And then Fiji v Uruguay happened. As I removed the dust from my eye following Juan Manuel Gaminaral’s beautiful post-match interview, I wondered where this match would sit in the canon of World Cup upsets, with commentators and social media calling it “one of the biggest upsets ever”. My prediction, in line with others, had been a 27-point win for Fiji, giving Uruguay only a 5% chance of victory, as per the graphic below.

To track the quality of my predictions, I’ve been plotting how the results from this tournament sit against my prediction curve on the chart below in black. I’ve also plotted the results from 2003-2015 in white to provide context. Results in the blue zone (above my trend line) indicate winning margins that were was higher than expected. In the grey zone, the higher ranked team still won, but by less than expected. Results in the orange zone represent upsets. The further to the right a data point is, the bigger the discrepancy in team strength. Today’s Fiji v Uruguay result is marked in blue. If you want to see how my predictions work, you can read about it here.

Uruguay’s victory is the second right-most upset, meaning that of all of the upsets in the data-set, this game had the second-highest discrepancy in strength between the two teams. The match with the highest? Japan v South Africa in 2015. Put in rugby terms, my model would have expected South Africa to have been better than Japan by 29 points, while today Fiji were expected to be better than Uruguay by 27. The table below shows all the RWC upsets since 2003, in descending order of the expected winning margin, where today’s match appears second.

We could therefore conclude that Uruguay’s wonderful, tournament-alighting victory is the second biggest upset in the history of the World Cup*, just ahead of Tonga’s defeat of France in 2011. But doesn’t this all rather miss the point? By reducing matches to a single number or a ranked list, we strip them of the context that gives them meaning. While it is valuable to take a temperature check which can protect us from overreacting in an age of hot takes, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable saying that today was a bigger, or less big, or indeed better or worse upset than Japan v South Africa. For me, it’s the emotions that days like today invoke that make them memorable. So can we say that this was the biggest giant felling in all World Cup history? No. But have I ever cried while listening to a post match interview before? Also no. Finally, the Uruguayan captain didn’t let his speech pass without recognising the people of Kamaishi, whose painful, inspiring story is outlined beautifully here. If you haven’t read it already, you really should. * at least since the rankings were first published in 2003, from which my analyses are derived.