Tending to significant optimism, yes, was always thus.

Though one can see many of the individual cases, eg. generally where our average prediction / range is well outstripping last year's range it is for players with quite significant green lines, for pretty upwardly mobile players of last year.

Will all these continue from their green ranges into the grey prediction ranges of this year ? - almost certainly not all, but it's difficult to isolate any and say any particular range looks clearly far too much. Who's 'brave' enough to say any particular of these green lines, for youngish players and a recovering player in Sam Murray, is not going to continue a fair rankings progression this year?

Is it then the red line 2017 move backwards players that we are more being too optimistic about? But then Mandy and Freya had their injury problems and our average predictions are quite close to their starting rankings of last year. Tara and Naomi's average predictions are interesting, looking pretty bang in the middle of their relatively small drop back for Naomi and big fall back for Tara. So I guess collectively we just about see all the improving players as continuing to improve and the players that fell back as going to recover somewhat. Be very good if that all happens . But again, arguably no range individually is obviously unrealistic - just it won't all happen ...

And one thing that I did mention in the "strongest nation" thread is that it is almost impossible to predict the one or two that will probably relatively crash through injury and / or unexpected severe loss of form so it is arguably very reasonable not to even try to predict the big fallers and accept taking a hit on one or two ( and of course the biggest 'hit' you actually get is zero, you get no negative scores ) and hope to be reasonably close with the rest.

As alway interesting to see, a very good one. Thanks, blob.