Hi and welcome to my blog! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and do come back.

Chatting to a mate of mine about sports while watching the Proteas whop Pakistan today, we decided that it’s pretty sweet to live in the Southern Hemisphere. We both decided that the Southern Hemisphere (SH) dominates the world of sports in many areas.

I decided that I should do some research in to this, and guess what I found? I found a lot of tables by alot of sources, took me a few minutes to find some reliable ranking pages but it has been done. Below you will see the tables for Rugby, Football, Hockey, Cricket and Netball.

RED teams are Southern Hemisphere

		1	Australia	128
		2	South Africa	123
		3	New Zealand	114
		4	Pakistan	111
		5	India	111
		6	Sri Lanka	108
		7	West Indies	106
		8	England	97
		9	Bangladesh	34
		10	Zimbabwe	30
		11	Kenya	0

		1	Australia	130
		2	England	119
		3	Pakistan	112
		4	India	111
		5	Sri Lanka	103
		6	South Africa	94
		7	New Zealand	92
		8	West Indies	72
		9	Zimbabwe	28
		10	Bangladesh	2

So there they are… and I think I was wrong… SH is not the place to be in terms of sports. We (when I say we I include all nations, continents and states in the SH for a full list visit Wikipedia) need to do some work, hit the streets, crack the gyms, pump the iron and inject… no wait, thats illegal!!

Australia

New Zealand

South Africa

Brazil

Without these four countries, we would have no teams in any of the rankings in the top 5.

I am not one of those old boys that wears his school brand 20 years after leaving school but I love my school and support it unashamedly. But one thing I do not agree with is the pressure that schools, players, parent and public put on 1st team players at school level.

A friend of mine, BigBev, alerted me to a story on rugby365.co.za that has surfaced. Certain Private school’s have all banded together and decided to take their schools out of the rugby ranking systems available online. Not only are these schools pulling out of the rugby rankings, but are also pulling out of any ranking system at all.

The schools involved have noted that they feel that the ranking systems create unhealthy competition between school which they say has an indirect effect on “marketing, scholarships and post-matric issues, as well as relationships between schools, parents and old boys.”

I think that this is a great move by these schools, however rugby365.co.za does have some interesting rebuttles:

How are schools going to stop people from ranking their rugby if the results of fixtures are made public? What is to stop me for example, from starting my own ranking site and keeping it up to date with the published results from the weekend?

They also noted that its a bit tought to blame the ranking sites and systems for bad blood between schools.

I think it’s an interesting argument.