I've just done a piece for Ubersportingpundit about the way that statistics loom so large in sport generally, and in cricket in particular. I gave it the same title there as I've used for this posting here. At the end I digressed into mentioning how sport encourages boys (especially) to get better at arithmetic.

That's it really. That's my point.

Take cricket. An enormous amount in cricket depends on, to put it bluntly, sums. Sums like: at what rate (runs per over) must the batting side score to get to their target total. If Steve Waugh makes a century, what will that do to his test match average? If England make 550, and Zimbabwe then make 250, and then followed on and make 200, England win by an innings and … what? (The Zimababwe cricket team, like much else in Zimbabwe these days, has been much weakened lately.)

I remember once explaining fractions to a twelve year old boy by talking about a soccer match the previous night. Man United had beaten some hapless rivals by 8 goals to 2. One Man U player scored 4 goals, so he scored half of the Man U goals. Another Man U guy scored 2 goals, so he scored a quarter of the Man U goals. And so on. The big insight was that this poor kid had never connected those damned "fractions" they tormented him with at school with regular and much used English words like "half" and "quarter". Yes, those are fractions. Four divided by eight, four over eight, is a half. Talking about football brought it all alive. I should imagine that there's many a maths teacher who has used sport in this kind of way.