English clubs seem to have finally realised that draws are not much use. That in turn suggests that English football is belatedly experiencing its own version of the Enlightenment: people in it are learning to reason and count.

Never mind the somewhat condescending tone of the piece – it looks at a genuinely interesting trend in football which has seen the lowest number of draws at this point in the season for 41 years.

This is thanks to a 28-year-old rule change which awarded three points for a win (up from 2) and one for a draw. It has taken nearly thirty years for teams to recognise that the additional point for a win makes a draw far less satisfactory.

Here’s how: if your team had three games that were looking like a draw in the last twenty minutes, you should push for a win, even if doing so is risky. If you won the first, held a draw in the second and lost the third, you would still gain 4 points, rather than 3 for all draws. Under the old rules you wouldn’t have earned any extra points for risk-taking.

Here’s to maths making football that little bit more exciting to watch! If football managers mugged up on their basic maths lessons, we might not have had to wait so long to see this change.

Kirtlington professional Andy Taylor will coach in six local schools after receiving an £800 grant from the Golf Foundation.
Taylor’s sessions will teach the sport and look to improve numeracy skills by applying a scoring system relevant to times-tables.

Practitioners and commentators have long needed maths skills to deal with the avalanche of statistics that accompany sports. Whether it’s an understanding of time and lap splits for track athletes, mental maths for darts players or batting averages for baseball players, maths is vital in sport.

We’ll be intrigued to see how Mr Taylor uses times tables to track golf scores, but wish him the best of luck in boosting his charges’ golf and maths at the same time. If golf really is a good walk, spoiled, maybe the maths will make up for it!

…hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.

recently made public to the USA’s Congress his enthusiasm for maths and science.

Whilst golfers hardly reflect the kind of demographic that needs most to benefit from good math and science education, it is nevertheless no bad thing that Mr Mickelson should make such a public plea. Sportsmen and women are too rarely associated with educational initiatives, and this is especially so in the UK.

Mickelson’s Teachers Academy, setup in 2005, trains selected teachers in new ways to convey the excitement of science and math in creative ways. His testimony to Congress included the oft-heard but too-little acted on warning that americans risk falling behind the rest of the world if they fail to train the next generation in the sciences and math.

This concern of losing out in the global race for ideas and skills features high in the minds of educational experts in the UK, but somehow the obsession with ‘knowing one’s place’ damns some people unfairly when they make public statements about areas seemingly beyond their remit.

In the UK we should applaud anyone who speaks out in favour of knowledge and learning, whether it’s Wayne Rooney or Stephen Hawking. And we don’t even need Mr Rooney to say earnestly how he relies on the advancements of science in his everyday life or understands the pleasure of calculating the perfect bicycle kick with trigonometry – we just need him to say that knowledge is its own good, and that sciences and math are the keys to the world.

It’s not much to ask.