So, as you read this, you’ll all know that, while Team USA once again took 1st Place in a roller derby tournament, they were forced to work hard for it by both 2nd place England and 3rd place Australia (Australia’s record low score differential against USA only being beaten by England’s own score differential against the Americans hours later).

Unlike many of the commentators, we at the blog were elated but unsurprised by England and Australia’s performance. England had previously beaten Canada this year (at Super Brawl of Roller Derby ) rather convincingly, and there was no particular reason to believe they couldn’t repeat the performance a second time. Australia’s team this year was looking exceptionally strong as well, with much more participation from Victorian Roller Derby, who are by far the strongest of the Australian leagues, with impressive performances in the USA this year.

We’ve done some post-facto analysis of the scores across the World Cup, and we’ve convinced ourselves that the available evidence supports the result of the tournament in placing England in 2nd (although we’d love to see Australia play England just to eliminate any doubt).

The full technical description of the process we adopted is over here on the author’s occasional personal WordPress to save space here. Associated with this is another essay explaining just why the Group+Single-elimination tournament structure chosen by the Cup has these ranking problems, and why, in particular, Germany is so horribly done by in the official B&T rankings.

After our extensive statistical analysis, however, we are happy to pronounce our Global Power ranking as:

1. USA

2. England

3. Australia

4. Canada

5. Finland

6. Sweden

7. Scotland

8. Argentina

9. NewZealand

10. Belgium

11. Ireland

12. France

13. Colombia

14. Germany

15. Denmark

16. Greece

17. Brazil

18. Norway

19. WestIndies

20. Wales

21. Chile

22. Netherlands

23. Italy

24. Spain

25. Portugal

26. Mexico

27. SouthAfrica

28. Switzerland

29. PuertoRico

30. Japan

(Note that this is not to say that the Blood & Thunder World Cup rankings are wrong – they are simply the rankings of how teams performed in the World Cup. Our ranking is an attempt to rank the National Teams in terms of how relatively good they are globally, which is not the same thing.)