BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO THE WEEKEND - Why the Wallabies look like winners, and Mourinho need not worry

Bluffer gives us all the key information to take into the weekend sport, featuring the Rugby World Cup final and a potential D-Day for Jose Mourinho.

It is almost over. For the Home Nations, and indeed the Europeans, it was over long ago, and on Saturday it will over even for those from Down Under. But which of the great Antipodean rugby nations will be triumphant in the Rugby World Cup?

The predictions come down to how the Rugby Bluffer deploys their knowledge.
History is bound to be made, it can safely be asserted, because no team has ever won the World Cup three times, yet Australia and New Zealand have each won it twice.

Statistically, the All Blacks are more likely to win because they have won more than two thirds of the matches played between the two teams (105 from 154 meetings) while Australia have won less than a third (42 wins - there have been 7 draws). Yet - also statistically - Australia are more likely to win because New Zealand are the defending champions, and no nation has ever successfully defended the Rugby World Cup

Recent form isn’t much use at splitting the teams: the bluffer will know that New Zealand won the most recent encounter, but also that the two teams have won two apiece of the last four, and drew the fifth.

How about form in the most recent match? Expert bluffers will point out sagely that winning World Cup teams often come out of poor performances - wake-up calls - in their semi-finals. New Zealand were run seriously close by South Africa - the bluffer will point out that they were on the wrong side of the penalty count by an extraordinary 14 to 6. Annoyingly, though, Australia were also poor against Argentina, having been outrun by the Pumas by 556 metres to 352.

Difficult, then for even the best-armed bluffer to pick a winner in this contest.

But the Bluffer’s Tie-Breaker says that Australia will win, based on the fact that the final will be refereed by Nigel Owens. He will be the first openly gay official to referee a World Cup final. But more significantly in this regard he is also a Welshman, and the only other time that a Welshman refereed a World Cup Final - Derek Bevan in 1991, also at Twickenham - Australia were victorious.

Back in the world where the ball is round, physical contact is frowned upon and the adoption of video technology is still, mystifyingly, in its infancy, the standout game in the Premier League pitches Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea against Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool for the first - and quite possibly the last - time with those respective managers in charge.

The German wunderkind has finally discovered what it takes to extract a win from his charges (although a 1-0 victory over Bournemouth in the Capital One Cup with a goal from a full-back is about as underwhelming as victory can possibly get). The Special One, meanwhile, looks more likely by the moment to become the Unemployed One.

Qualification for the Champions League is the bare minimum requirement for retaining his position, and that is far from impossible. A convincing triumph over Liverpool at Stamford Bridge would shoo away the vultures at least for a while, and it is not such a tall order.

The key point in Mourinho’s favour, Blue Bluffers should note, is that Chelsea have an excellent recent record against these visitors, with three wins and three draws in the last six matches between the two. And Liverpool are not only in managerial transition, with Klopp yet to convince the Kop that he has settled on his best team, but they are also nervous travellers to the capital of late, without a win on the five most recent visits to London.

On the managerial front Mourinho has taken on a hangdog appearance, and will not enjoy proximity to the taller, younger and notably less grey German on the touchline. Even more annoyingly, Klopp has a winning record against Mourinho in the Champions League, courtesy of two wins for his Borussia Dortmund side over Mourinho’s Real Madrid in 2012/13.

Formula One returns to Mexico this weekend for the first time since 1992 or – as Lewis Hamilton put it with the confidence of a still youthful triple world champion – “for the first time in the modern era”.

With the championship done and dusted, automotive bluffers might like to expand on Hamilton’s remark. The last time the series raced in Mexico City the cars were hardly antiquated or slow – they did not run on slender tyres or carry ride-on mechanics. The last corner at Mexico has been renamed Mansell after Nigel, the British winner of the last F1 race there. His Williams that year had a top speed in excess of 200mph and within 5mph of today’s cars, and cornering speeds were so rapid that tyre widths were decreased from 1992 onwards to reduce them.

The highest top speed for a Formula One car in competition is shade under 230mph, set not this year but more than a decade ago by Antonio Pizzonia’s BMW Williams at the Italian Grand Prix of 2004. That year is probably the fastest in F1 history in terms of average speeds, and that year’s Ferrari, the F2004, is generally reckoned to have been the fastest all-round F1 car of all time.

Were the drivers any braver “before the modern era”? Bluffers should recommend that youngsters in their audience have a look at the video of Nigel Mansell overtaking Gerhard Berger around the outside of the corner now named after him in Mexico in 1990. Then decide.