Watching the movie Moneyball got Stuart MacGill thinking about how much use statistical analysis has in sport. Having worked with John Buchanan, a notorious statistics boffin, MacGill says computers and stats have a role to play in sport, but the basic principles of the game are more important. The only statistics that matter in cricket, MacGill writes in the Sydney Morning Herald, are: make more runs than the opposition and bowl them out twice.

John excitedly told me that whenever I pitched the ball on off stump, the batsman wasn't scoring. He generally took half an hour to make a point and, considering the tea break at a Test match is only 20 minutes, we were already walking back onto the field at the time. I turned to him and replied that the reason they weren't scoring when I bowled that particular delivery was because the ball had been turning half a metre and they couldn't actually reach it. I thanked him kindly for his input and asked him whether or not he thought I should concentrate instead on getting them out. His blank face indicated that he would have to go back to the laptop before he could respond.

Steve James, in the Daily Telegraph, writes of the significant role statistics play in a team's preparation.

Cricketers, despite their games being defined by statistics, are like most other sportsmen in being a little coy about numbers. Ask a batsman his average, and he will generally play it cool. But he knows. And these days he will know much more than just that figure. Recently I chanced upon a county team's crib sheet for a Twenty20 match. The statistical detail was mind-boggling. There were figures for everything from the 'dot ball limit' at a certain ground to the overall number of boundaries usually required to win there, setting such targets as scoring a minimum of seven boundaries in the first six overs.

Mathematics is rather important in one-day cricket, says Steve James, writing in the Daily Telegraph. Just ask the captains who were at at the chaotic England domestic Twenty20 Finals Day in Edgbaston last week or the South Africa team from the 2003 World Cup ...

Recently I chanced upon a county team's crib sheet for a Twenty20 match. The statistical detail was mind-boggling. There were figures for everything from the 'dot ball limit' at a certain ground to the overall number of boundaries usually required to win there, setting such targets as scoring a minimum of seven boundaries in the first six overs.

Arvind Iyengar crunches numbers and comes up with a list of the best ODI bowlers of all time on ESPNStar. His top five are: Glenn McGrath, Richard Hadlee, Shaun Pollock, Allan Donald, and Wasim Akram.

Western Province lost wickets on 111, 222 and 333 in the second innings of their South African Airways Provincial Three-Day Challenge match against KwaZulu-Natal in Cape Town last weekend. For more interesting details, read this post.

Writing in The Guardian, Ian Bell stumbles across a statistic:

Apparently, I average 64 in the first innings in Test cricket and 23 in the second. While I'm delighted to be averaging so many in the first dig, the other figure is probably something I need to look at. Mind the gap, as they say.

Bell finds parallels in greats like Steve Waugh, who had two half-centuries in the fourth innings of a Test.