Proficiency in mathematics

India players barred from playing multiple U-19 World Cups
24 Jun, 2016
ESPNcricinfo staff
The BCCI has decided that players who have represented India in one Under-19 World Cup cannot take part in another edition of the tournament, even if they meet the age criteria to do so. The board approved this suggestion of its junior committee in the BCCI working committee meeting on Friday.

The working committee has also decided that players who enter the system at the Under-19 stage can play a maximum of two seasons of Under-19 cricket.

Though the BCCI did not specify the reasons behind the move, it can be seen as an attempt to crack down on overage players, which has been a thorny issue over a number of years in Indian cricket.

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India news August 15, 2015 Onus on states to curb age-fudging problem - AMOL KARHADKAR

The issue of age-fudging in Indian cricket is a persistent problem despite the BCCI trying various measures to prevent it. Players - in connivance with their coaches, parents and associations - getting their age reduced to play longer in age-group cricket is a malaise in Indian, as well as Asian, cricket.

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Shashank Kishore
Even seen a 17-year-old bowl fast or hit monstrous sixes and wondered if he was "at least 20-21"? If you felt the same watching Rasikh Salam, the Jammu & Kashmir fast bowler who played for Mumbai Indians in IPL 2019, your worst fears are true.

Documents have proved Rasikh is two years older than he claims to be. This became public after a BCCI investigation pointed to a mismatch between two "original birth certificates" obtained from different sources. There were also discrepancies between these and his school-leaving certificate.

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ESPNcricinfo staff
One of cricket's greatest mysteries has finally been solved...sort of.

Shahid Afridi, as many fans have long suspected, is not as young as official records have had it all these years. Afridi himself has made the revelation in his autobiography Game Changer released in India and Pakistan this week. In a chapter in which he describes his call-up to the senior Pakistan team in October 1996, Afridi writes that he was born in 1975. Though he doesn't give a month or day, that makes him, potentially, five years older than what he is: official records, including ESPNcricinfo's player profile pages record his date of birth as March 1, 1980.

Afridi debuted in an ODI tri-series tournament in Nairobi, and, most famously, hit a 37-ball hundred the first time he batted in international cricket. That record stood for over 17 years and was even more outrageous for the fact that it had been achieved by a 16-year-old. Except, now we know, he wasn't.

Yet Afridi only deepens the confusion in his book with the following line: "Also, for the record, I was just nineteen, and not sixteen like they claim. I was born in 1975. So, yes, the authorities stated my age incorrectly." If he was born in 1975, that would make him 20 or 21 at the time of the innings and not 19 as he writes.



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It's 40-plus years since I was a pupil in schools in Slough, but at the time everyone knew that this was the reason why some lads who were from the Indian subcontinent, or whose families came from there, were able to grasp mathematical concepts before the rest of us.

You just lost count of the times the exasperated headmaster would be forced to conduct yet another interrogation of some moustachioed third former: "Just what age are you? You've changed it again!"

Just to be clear. I'm definitely not claiming this is the reason behind every Asian exam success. Not by a long chalk.

But I feel it needs to be acknowledged that the attitude of some parents from an Asian background to education is a demand for exam success and for qualifications at whatever cost.

I can understand the attitude. The idea is that if their children have a maths A level certificate, or whatever, it makes them less vulnerable to discrimination when applying for a job.

On the wider subject, I sometimes wonder whether there is such a thing as a "natural" grasp of the subject.

I remember the first time we were confronted with simultaneous equations at school. I found myself coming up with the answers for x and y within seconds of the equations being chalked up on the blackboard, but not through any kind of Rain Man-style intuition. I was simply enjoying the challenge of the puzzle, and making the effort to go through the possible combinations in my head to find the common factor, then do the simple subtraction to find the answer. Normal, painstaking work, in other words, but done very quickly, because I liked the smug feeling that came from cracking it before everyone else.

I was going greyhound racing with Dad aged 5 onwards and subsequently I could work out bets in my head from a very young age. I actually got 100% in my 'O'level mock exam and got A grade in the real one and at 'A'level and it was all down to my background of dealing with numbers at various dog tracks!

The Chinese have a phrase for it ‘ chiku’  or eating bitter ....if there is a goal worth achieving then day to day life must be unpleasant for a spell

But then again this doesn’t explain slippys or screenings ability which seened to come naturally

Slippy - did you go to uni?

I can still recall one of my earliest  memories at school starting to learn maths ,and having to find a way to imagine the numbers in my head
the number 5 became not a letter but 5 dots that I would see in my mind and 7 etc

It was this that got me started  , it was difficult before that,
I still recall where I was sitting in the classroom ( only 4 or 5 ) and first trying this as a way to change the letter 5 to a number 5

That little trick I figured out for myself to get started and to be able to imagine numbers at that age is more vivid than when I was learning to read
I can still see myself sitting there that day at 4 years of age and  realising ah , this will work :)

No I didn't go to uni i-a-w-n. I didn't want to as I didn't really see the point and I went straight to work for my Dad who was a property developer in London and I was the buyer and did payroll for him for 10 years before I got married and moved away.

By asian I presume the OP means chinese/far eastern.

...although the same could be said, in my experience, about kids of Chinese origin but there were very few at my school. Even fewer from other far eastern and middle-eastern countries.

A consequence of which is that there was no racial bullying at my school.

One  black lad -cool dude one hAlf fast grammar school 75/82
Half ast nickname Rusty

The football pools were a terrific education, especially having a foreign father who never really understood them. It meant I had total responsibility from the age of six for doing the pools, as well as sorting out his bets on the racing. The arrival of the new booklet of plans and perms from the pools companies at the start of the season were as big a highlight of the holidays as the Beano Summer Special for me.

I can still remember the thrill I got when I realized the reason there were 165 lines in an 8 from 11: 11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4 divided by 8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 equals 165. And you could reduce that to 11x10x9 divided by 3x2x1 ! Brilliant. I must have been about seven at the time.

my pools collector really pushed spot the ball


cos he was pocketing the lot

loved 10 homes

Yeah. I wonder how many pools collectors went to their graves with almost a sense of relief: "Now it was all over, and I got away with it." The original picking-up-pennies-in-front-of-a-steamroller.

They didn't always get away with it, mind you:

Student jailed for cheating pools syndicate
Friday 15 September 1995 00:02

Click to follow
The Independent
A man who cheated five members of a football pools syndicate out of a pounds 2.3m fortune has been jailed for 30 months.

Cameron Baxter, 27, pocketed the pounds 5 stake money he had collected from five Scottish Power workers instead of handing it over to Littlewoods. The syndicate had the only winning line that week and would have won a jackpot of more than pounds 2.3m.

When Baxter, from Stirling, appeared for sentence yesterday at the High Court in Glasgow, Lord Ross, the Lord Justice Clerk, told him: "This is in many ways a tragic case not only for you and your family but for those affected by your crime. However, it does appear to me that it was a mean offence which involved a breach of trust."

Lord Ross said the amount of money which Baxter took had not been large, but the consequences for the victims were in some ways "catastrophic". He had "deprived them of winning a considerable sum of money".


However, Lord Ross accepted that there were mitigating factors. The court had heard that Baxter, a mature student at Stirling University, depended during the summer holidays last year on the pounds 35 a week he made as a pools collector.

He had got into financial difficulties after his car was stolen and had a couple of accidents with his family's car.

Baxter admitted forming a fraudulent scheme to obtain football pools stake money and to appropriate it to his own use when he appeared at the High Court in Edinburgh three weeks ago; that, while acting as a pools collector between 24 July and 10 September last year, he pretended to various people in Stirling that he would forward pools coupons and stake money on their behalf, and that he induced them to hand over completed coupons and stake money totalling pounds 216, embezzling the cash and failing to deliver the stakes and coupons to Littlewoods.

The five-man syndicate which missed out on the jackpot yesterday launched a court action to sue Littlewoods for the pounds 2.3m they would have won. Gordon Turner, John Ferguson, Donald McVean, Richard Syme and Owen Kelly, from Stirling, have raised pounds 30,000 to fund a private action, which was launched at the Court of Session in Edinburgh after Baxter was sentenced.

Cameron Fyfe, lawyer for the syndicate, said his clients believed Baxter was an agent of the pools company therefore it was liable for his actions.

However, Littlewoods has maintained previously that it did not employ collectors, but that they were agents of the clients.

As with everything in life there will be a natural aptitude then work on top of it to improve it.

Final result = Base value + (Natural Ability * Effort).

Someone average at maths or piano who puts the hours in will be better than someone with more talent who plays fornite and smokes weed.

How about Darts then :P

maths lesson number2= 7 uneven numbers will never total 30.

As @Just Checking says, hard work is an important part of the equation, allied to natural talent. One key factor alluded to by many forumites is an interesting application. It is that interest that motivates the child to put in the hours of practice, because it is play rather than work.

Talent without application is a fragile combination. I myself got an A at A-level chemistry without having taken a single note in the sixth form, and having handed back the text books on the first day. It meant I arrived at university not appreciating the need actually to study the subject, let alone having the slightest idea how one might set about it.

There is perhaps another factor relevant to the children of immigrants. Their families might well have had latent talents in music or mathematics but with no outlet, and forced to work 18 hours a day in a sweatshop or on a tea plantation, you'd never know, but once their children are set free in this country, the sky is the limit. For native families, this is less likely now but may have been the case up to the war years, when the class you were born into pretty much settled your future. Probably in the 50s and 60s there was a similar flowering of talent from the old white working class.