The Rugby Championship returns on Saturday with New Zealand favourites to defend the title and extend their lead at the top of the World Rugby Rankings which currently stands at 4.64 points.

The All Blacks have claimed four of the five titles since the southern hemisphere’s elite international competition took on a quadrangular format, their only blip coming in the truncated season of 2015 when Australia were crowned champions.

Last year they defied predictions of a Rugby World Cup hangover to register six bonus-point wins from six, finishing a whopping 17 points clear of runners-up Australia.

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Those two great rivals meet in the opening round of the 2017 Championship at the ANZ Stadium in Sydney, and it will be fascinating to see how the world’s number one team respond to the drawn series against the British and Irish Lions.

It may come as a small crumb of comfort to the Wallabies and fellow participants South Africa and Argentina, who meet in Port Elizabeth later on Saturday, that the All Blacks actually lost their first match the last time they came off the back of a Lions series, the 4-0 whitewash of the 2005 tourists followed by a 22-16 defeat to South Africa at Newlands.

With more than 10 rating points between the sides at kick-off, big gains are on the line for Australia from a rankings perspective if they can upset the odds and inflict a rare Rugby Championship defeat on New Zealand. In 27 previous outings, the All Blacks have only lost twice and drawn one.

Any form of victory for Australia would move Michael Cheika’s men above Ireland into third place, with a win by more than 15 points worth as many as 2.58 points.

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Should New Zealand follow the formbook and continue their dominance at this level with an emphatic victory, they can profit to the tune of 0.43 of a point, increasing their lead over England to more than five points in the process.

BOKS AIM TO GO FOURTH

South Africa will replace a defeated Australia in fourth place in the rankings if they take the momentum from their 3-0 June series win over France and see off Argentina at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, a venue where they have never lost in four outings.

Recent matches between the two have been tight with the home side coming out on top on each occasion in 2016. South Africa’s 30-23 win over Los Pumas in Nelspruit was only their second success in nine Rugby Championship fixtures since Pat Lambie’s late penalty earned them a famous 27-25 win over the All Blacks at Ellis Park in 2014.

A convincing victory is worth 0.35 points to Allister Coetzee’s men which would see them close the gap on Ireland to just under nine tenths. Any form of defeat would see Argentina drop to 10th with Fiji moving up to their previous all-time best of ninth.

Los Pumas go into the Championship having lost both their tests to an experimental England line-up in June, scoring seven tries but conceding eight in reply.

Defensively they need to tighten up if they are to make more of an impression on a competition where they have finished bottom in all but one of the five tournaments they have contested.

They do know how to win in South Africa, though, a 37-25 win at Kings Park in Durban helping to keep them off the bottom in 2015. A similar scoreline would be worth 1.77 points – enough to take them above France and into eighth. In dropping to ninth, France would equal their lowest-ever position since the rankings were introduced in October 2003.

A Los Pumas win by more than 15 points would result in each side moving three places – Argentina up to sixth and South Africa down to eighth. Scotland would also profit from South Africa’s demise, climbing one place to fifth.

RANKINGS RIVALS

The only other game that can affect the rankings this weekend is the first of two encounters between hosts Kenya and Hong Kong on Sunday.

With just one place and a fraction over a point separating the higher-ranked Hong Kong from the Simbas in the rankings, a closely contested series looks in prospect at the RFUEA Grounds in Nairobi.

The sides have only met twice before, with one win apiece. Kenya took the spoils 34-10 in Nairobi last August, while the first clash in Dubai in 2011 ended in a 44-17 win for Hong Kong.

Kenya will leapfrog Hong Kong and move into 24th place if they back up last year’s win, while a two-place gain, to 22nd, is possible for a victorious Hong Kong with Germany and Canada slipping a place as a result.

The World Rugby Rankings will update at 12 noon UK time on Monday.