BLUFFERS GUIDE TO THE WEEKEND - McBluffers know the score, and Sochi looks like F1′s longest lap

Bluffer provides all the info and statistics you need for the weekend ahead, including Scotland’s big game action on two fronts.

For reasons that are painfully obvious to England rugby fans and delightfully so to their football-crazy counterparts, there is scant need for the sporting bluffer to be concerned with the fixtures of the rose-wearers and the Three Lions brigade this weekend.

The sweet chariots have departed the Twickenham car park - now occupied largely by tumbleweed - but the Rugby World Cup continues and mathematicians with recently discovered Scottish antecedents have been trying to work out what still needs to happen in order for them to retain an interest in the World Cup quarter-finals.

Bluffers with Scottish accents need to know that their team must defeat Samoa at St James’ Park in Newcastle on Saturday in order to ensure progression. The McBluffer can confidently declare his team the favourites since they have won eight of the ten meetings between the sides (there has been one draw).

They may choose, though, to draw a tartan veil over the one blot on that record, a 27-17 defeat in what was inconveniently the last meeting between the two. The McBluffer should move swiftly on to the scoring record of the two sides against each other, which suggests that the Scots tend to score a shade more than 10 points more than their opponents - every time the opponents are Samoa.

Wales and Ireland are already through, which gives their bluffers a quieter few days, although if the Welsh wish to keep their skills up to the mark they can talk up how closely matched their boys should be with Australia in the match that could cement bragging rights over England for years to come.

It is true that Wales have lost their last - ahem - ten matches in a row against the Wallabies, but the bluffer can point out the margins have been almost invariably tight - all but three of those defeats have been by seven points or fewer.

On the football front it is once again the bluffers from north of Hadrian’s Wall who had to get their calculators out - but they can put them down again now, before the weekend has even started.

The key obstacle to tartan advancement for Euro 2016 has been the Poles, who - even before their most recent encounter with the Scots - had scored 29 goals in their eight European championship qualifying matches.

That is more than any of the other 53 teams in the competition. Scotland should have seen it coming, then.

Bluffers who feel that they have had enough balls for the time being should turn their attention to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, host city for the Russian Formula One Grand Prix.

The city itself is a source of fascinating facts – it is, for example, 90 miles long, which locals claim makes it the longest city in Europe. This also means that if the circuit were reconfigured to run from one end of the city to the other and back, with a hairpin at either end, the race would comprise one lap – the optimum length for a Formula One race being a little over 180 miles.

Back in the real world – where 53 laps of a more modest circuit are required – Mercedes need to score just three points more than Ferrari to secure the constructors championship, and what is reported to be a £50m prize money bonus, courtesy of F1’s arcane system of rewards.

Back-to-back constructors’ championships, as any oil-stained bluffer will know, are far from rare. In fact Brawn – which later morphed into Mercedes – is the only team to have “failed” to defend a constructors’ title in the last decade.

Lewis Hamilton can also join a fairly select club this weekend. Bluffers take notes: having won last year’s inaugural event in Sochi, the Englishman could become only the ninth driver in Formula One history to win the first two events at a circuit new to F1 racing. Hamilton may also take comfort from the knowledge that his current lead over team-mate Nico Rosberg is, at 48 points, the largest margin he has enjoyed over any team-mate at any part of any season, apart from last year’s Abu Dhabi finale.

Looking further afield for bluffable material we alight momentarily on the Presidents Cup in golf, which takes place this weekend in South Korea. Since the only question that this event can elicit is “What is the Presidents Cup?” the bluffer need only be able to reply that it concerns the USA v The Rest of the World – except Europe.

It is, in simpler terms, what American golfers, and indeed commentators, do to keep their national pride intact in years when the Ryder Cup is not being held.
It also – usually – assists the US national golfing ego, since they have won all but two of the ten previous stagings.