World Cup: Last shuffle of the deck

Kazakhstan finished their on-field preparations by winning the Asian Top Four in May; New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Samoa played out their four-nation series at the beginning of the month.

Now the coaches of the remaining seven teams who will play in August's World Cup have their final chance to shuffle the cards and find the team that will take them to glory in Paris.

There will be internationals almost every day between 28th June and 6th July - nine games in all. Most will not be classed as full test matches, some will even be played behind closed doors, but they will all be vital games for players and coaches.

The week (and a bit) of rugby will look like this:

Apart from Wales' visit to Ireland on 20th July, that will complete the preliminaries. After this the next games will be in the World Cup itself.

The increased activity of the top teams has also had an effect on the ScrumQueens Test Rankings, as produced by us by Serge Piquet,whichwe last reviewedat the end of the Six Nations.

Four wins in four games were enough to move New Zealand back to the top, leap-frogging England and France, while Canada’s encouraging performances in New Zealand are enough to  move them firmly into fourth place.Australia, on the other hand, after two substantial defeats, remain in 12thplace. While acknowledging that this is almost certainly too low for the side that finished third in 2010, their performance in their two tests also provided no significant evidence as to how high they should be.

Scrumqueens test rankings: 24th June 2014

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

*

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

*

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

New Zealand

England

France

Canada

Ireland

United States

Wales

Italy

Scotland

Spain

South Africa

Australia

Nomads

Sweden

Netherlands

Samoa

Kazakhstan

Russia

Germany

Japan

Belgium

Hong Kong

Finland

Singapore

Switzerland

Uganda

China

Norway

Kenya

Romania

Trinidad & Tob.

Fiji

Cayman

Thailand

Uzbekistan

Denmark

Caribbean Select

Jamaica

Tonga

Philippines

Luxembourg

Malaysia

Laos

Guyana

Brasil

Czech Rep.

Serbia

Rwanda

Barbados

Bosnia & Herz

Austria

Colombia

Namibia

Zambia

Mayotte

Bahamas

Croatia

St Vincent

Portugal

Kyrgyzstan

Burundi

Venezuela

Réunion

Cambodia

Botswana

Hungary

PNG

Zimbabwe

4720

4698

4589

4579

4334

4331

4133

4115

3922

3869

3772

3583

3160

2922

2885

2683

2620

2032

1929

1828

1675

1588

1518

1343

1123

1032

951

914

866

810

804

704

683

670

647

631

619

594

530

515

491

478

458

440

400

382

355

348

298

260

246

199

188

183

181

178

167

133

126

125

123

106

91

86

86

81

68

57