As you are all aware, Ireland are about to embark on a Six Nation’s rugby campaign generating public fervour and interest the likes of which hasn’t been seen before. With so many once in a generation type players lining out in green we’ve never had it so good. With all that's been written in the last days and weeks it's hard to keep your feet on the ground.

In order to focus some of the brute force of this mass public sporting convulsion that is about to wash over the country I’d like to give you all an opportunity to display your tipping skills. Fantasy/Shmantasy, we’ve all been there and done that with the soccer, and we sure don’t need people from other footballing codes coming into our blog arena and telling us how to run our tipping games.

So instead of Fantasy Rugby, I’ve got something altogether simpler and less involved. On each of the five match weekends over the course of the competition, all you’ve got to do is guess the scoreline in each of the three matches that weekend. This will soon show up those who know their truck-and-trailers from their rolling mauls, or in my case, blatantly expose my predilection for putting heart before head when it comes to rugby analysis. Results and standings in the competition will be published here after each match weekend. Of course there will be a token prize for the winner, I know Colm is working feverishly to come up with something fitting the one who would be king of Rugby tipping on In Fact, Ah.

Now, the specific scoring rules of the game are a little more involved (see below) than all that for you detail hounds, but essentially you are rewarded for guessing as close as possible to the correct scores for the three games on each of the five match weekends.

I shall post on here each Thursday morning preceeding the five match weekends inviting you to predict, you simply leave your prediction in the comments section of the post and I’ll take it from there. I’ll leave my prediction first off each week and please copy my format (A unique name for yourself in the competition, 3 matches predictions with home teams first) when posting your prediction to make the totting up easier on yours truly.

Once I post each Thursday morning asking for your predictions for that week, you have until 3p.m. on Friday to get your prediction in. I’ll be taking a snapshot of the predictions at that time.

EDIT:As this is the first weekend I will make an exception and accept predictions for match weekend 1 until midday Saturday Feb 3rd.

Match Weekend 1, please leave your predictions as comments to this post before midday Saturday 3rd Feb:

Italy –v- France
England –v- Scotland
Wales –v- Ireland

Finally, for the rugby enthusiasts among you I’d like to point you in the direction of the irishrugby yahoo group and mailing list, where you can find detailed, thorough, inside-track and ultimately very informative banter and chat regarding all things that are both rugby and Irish.

My thanks go to Michael Halpenny who runs this same competition on the irishrugby yahoo group for his support.

The competition scoring and rules are as follows:

Lowest score wins the competition. The difference between your scoreline for each team is added to your competition points score. i.e. if you predict Ireland 14 - 10 Italy and the actual score is Ireland 10 - 21 Italy then you will get 25 points broken down as follows: 4 points (14 - 10) i.e. the difference between your prediction for Ireland’s score and their actual score + 11 points (21 - 10) i.e. the difference between your prediction for Italy’s score and their actual score. There is also a penalty of 10 points for getting the winning team wrong, so your total score would be 4+11+10 = 25

As mentioned above if you get the winning team wrong you get another 10 points.
If by some fluke you get the reverse score i.e. right scores but wrong winning team you get minus 10 points. The person with the most accurate prediction for each match (after the above 10 point bonuses are taken into account) gets minus -10 points. If you predict the exact correct score for a game you get -30 points. If you fail to predict the score of any match you will get the default prediction (0 - 0). In the unlikely event that two people are tied at the end of the 5 rounds then whoever’s prediction appears first in the comments for the final match weekend will be declared the winner.

The official deadline for predictions is Friday 3p.m. before the match weekend. Please do not post multiple predictions for one match weekend, if you do I will choose one of your predictions arbitrarily. I am not responsible for predicitions that go missing, please ensure your prediction has posted successfully to the comments section.

Any decision I make regarding this competition will be final and no correspondence on my decisions will be entered into.


tags: rugby, six nations

Published by Paul.