One of the tasks which the organisers of the 2012 Olympics will have looked forward to the least will have been the ticket distribution. With demand inevitably set to outstrip supply, and in an age where everybody believes they have a “right” to whatever they want, the process was always going to generate world-class quantities of bad feeling. However, the whinging which has occupied so many acres of newsprint has been anything but Olympic standard, culminating in this pathetic piece by Allison Pearson in the Telegraph this week. The gist of that article was: “I applied for tickets to some low-profile sports and got them! What an awful job the organisers have done! I hate them, I hate them!”

This completely unhinged rant, widely derided in social media, actually asks the question: “How can three million first-round tickets have gone to just 700,000 people?” And the answer is, Allison, to do the maths. People bought tickets in fours. Can you imagine what the Polly Fillers of this world would have had to say if tickets had been sold singly? Some people did get more than one lot (including Allison Pearson), but that was probably because at least one of their successful applications was for a sport which didn’t sell out.

Yes, I was lucky enough to get something. Not the men’s 100m final or anything like that, but at least it’s something. I put it down to doing a bit of homework beforehand, and playing the game. Here’s how.

The most common complaint I hear (from people I respect) is that the system favoured people who could put many thousands of pounds in their bank account. I don’t believe that’s true. What many people aren’t admitting is that they wish they’d applied for a lot more tickets, because they now (and only now) realise they didn’t have much to lose.

Imagine that a ticket to an event cost £100, and four times the number of people applied as there were tickets available. So if you just put in for one event, you’d have a one-in-four chance of getting one. If you put in for two events, you’d have a 44% chance of getting one, and a 6% chance of getting two. If you put in for three events, you’d have a 58% chance of getting one, etc.

Now, the problem was that the organisers said you had to have the money in your bank account to cover the tickets you’d been allocated. And people said: “I can’t apply for more than X, because that’s the most money I can have in my bank account when they come to take it”. But they weren’t playing the odds. In the example above, supposing your limit was £200. If you took the attitude that you couldn’t put in for three tickets, because you couldn’t have £300 in your bank account, you were assuming that there was a chance of you being successful with all three allocations, and ending up with nothing because you couldn’t fund it. In reality, that was never going to happen. The chances of you being successful with three applications out of three, in the above example, are 1.5%. Yes, it would be infuriating if it happened, and you hit the jackpot with a massive success rate. Imagine then ending up with nothing! But that was never going to happen.

That’s why I put in for 15 events, at a cost of something like £8,000. Whether I could afford to pay for them or not is irrelevant, because there wasn’t enough money in my bank account to cover more than about 8, even if I’d been lucky enough to have got that many. But I worked out that the chances of getting more than 8 out of 15 were so tiny that it wasn’t a situation worth worrying about. Trust me, if I’d got the lot I’d have gone to my grave regretting that I didn’t raise the cash to have covered the allocation. It’s not as if it would have been hard to shift them on to friends and family. However, by putting in for 15 events, my chances of getting at least a couple were very strong. And so it proved. I could quite comfortably cover the cost of the tickets I ended up getting.

The other widely heard complaint is that the system seemed to have been set up to encourage people to apply for more tickets than they might have done otherwise. You don’t say. Guess what? Olympic Games don’t traditionally sell out, not even in the most sports-mad countries. One of the organisers’ highest priorities from the outset will have been to fill every grandstand, even at the lowest profile sports. Not because empty seats would look embarrassing, but because of the ammunition it would (rightly) give the people who don’t think that this country should be hosting the event anyway (and that’s another argument for which I might even have some sympathy). I have genuine respect for sales techniques which extract the maximum results by sheer ingenuity, where the 3G mobile spectrum auction remains the high water mark.

I dread to think what things would have been like if the Olympic tickets had been sold on some sort of “first-come first-served” basis. Apart from handing an unfair advantage to the quick-witted and computer-literate, the chance of the IT infrastructure being able to cope would have been about the same as my chance of getting tickets for the men’s 100m final. Which I’ll be watching, quite contentedly, on TV.

1Password

Woo hoo. Better passwords, and all instantly available when you’re away from your little notebook.

BBC iPlayer

Watching telly in bed is great, but having the telly in bed with you is a whole new world.

Cineworld

Great example of a commercial organisation making an App which is better than their website.

Dropbox

Makes transferring files from my desktop Mac über-easy.

Filterstorm

Wonderful for quick editing of images on the road before sending them to someone.

LogMeIn

The fact this works at all was one of the pleasantest surprises of the year. Brilliant.

Reeder

I’m addicted to RSS. I probably read the equivalent of several magazines’ worth of articles a week this way. And now all on the iPad. This is just very comfortable.

RightMove

Property porn. Love the fact it can show you houses for sale around wherever you are.

Sky+

Oh no! I forgot to set the Sky+ box before I left home! Except it doesn’t matter now. I want to marry the instigator of this app.

TuneIn Radio

Makes your iPad into the world’s best radio/alarm clock. Simply perfect.

TV Catchup

Not perfect, and I think we’re a couple of years away from really watchable real-time video streaming, but just occasionally, it’s been wonderful.

Twitterific

I’ve tried several Twitter clients, but I tend to reach for this by default.

Alistair Cook takes Australia apart

Europe win the Ryder Cup

Mo Farah at the European Athletics Championships

The longest tennis match ever

Amy on her Skeleton Bob at the Winter Olympics

England beat Australia 21-20

The T20 World Cup Final

Tony McCoy wins the Grand National

Mark Webber’s crash in Valencia

My Favourite Football Moments of 2010

1. The World Cup

The consensus is that it wasn’t a great World Cup, but watch this and remember how many memorable moments there were: Robert Green’s howler; Frank Lampard’s goal that wasn’t; Holland beating Brazil; Keisuke Honda; the chest-high karate kick in the final; Iker Casillas’ girlfriend; Diego Forlan; the Germans; Uruguay cheating Ghana out of a semi-final place; and loads more.

2. Barcelona 5 Real Madrid 0

Blimey. The performance of the year, surely.

3. Ipswich Town 3 Coventry City 2

In a year with hardly anything to remember at Portman Road, I guess I have to pick the injury time from the first home match of 2010.

4. The best goals not scored by my team

Oooh, nice. The most expensively-placed grocer’s apostrophe I’ve seen for a long time. A half page advertisement in The Times doesn’t come cheap. And when your ad only has a few words on it, well, proof-reading isn’t that onerous a task. But apparently it was all a bit much for T-Mobile and its ad agency. The company is merging its services with Orange, by the looks of things, and I wonder if a new advertising agency is responsible?

A friend threw a pub quiz-style question at me today: “How many sets of brothers can you name who have both played football in the English First Division (or Premier League)?” It’s a good one, and I have to admit my answer was quite pathetic, drying up at around two or three. Later, I went online to try to find some more, and was amazed to find that there are dozens, possibly hundreds. One list gave over 20 pairs of brothers who both played for England!. There were also good references from the Daily Mirror and The Times.

If you have any corrections or additions to this list, I’d be delighted to read your comments at the bottom.

So here we go, not in any particular order, but perhaps starting with the greatest sets of brothers of all, and a few sets of more than two brothers!

Bobby and Jack Charlton
Nearly 1,600 club appearances between them, and a World Cup Final for good measure.

Denis and Leslie Compton
Denis may have been one of the greatest all-rounders in sporting history, but Leslie made 253 Arsenal appearances to Denis’s 54.

Danny and Jackie Blanchflower
Jackie’s career for Manchester United was cut short by injuries from the team’s Munich air crash, while elder brother Danny is widely regarded as Spurs’ greatest ever player.

Allan, Frank, Derek and Wayne Clarke
Allan scored over 100 goals for Leeds, Frank appeared in Division One for Ipswich, Derek made five top-flight appearances for Wolves, and Wayne was in the championship-winning Everton team of 1987. A fifth brother, Kelvin, appeared for Walsall but never played at the top level.

Bob, Peter and Dave Latchford
Peter and Dave were both goalkeepers, playing in Division One for WBA and Birmingham City respectively, while middle brother Bob scored over 200 goals in hais career, notably for Birmingham City and Everton.

Danny, Ray and Rod Wallace
Actually played in the Southampton team together in 1988.

Jacky, William and George Carr
All played in the same team, Middlesbrough, in 1920.

John and Justin Fashanu
Justin was the one remembered for his goal of the season and for being Britain’s first million-pound black footballer, but John got the England caps.

Gary and Phil Neville
Their 800 club appearances and over 140 England caps seem great in this modern age, but I guess they ain’t no Bobby and Jack.

Xabi and Mikel Alonso
A pairing who scrape in thanks to Mikel’s 7 appearances for Bolton.

Rio and Anton Ferdinand
Both started at West Ham, but Rio moved on to greater things.

Shaun and Bradley Wright-Phillips
Half-brothers; Bradley managed about 40 appearances for Manchester City in the mid-noughties.

Fabio and Rafael Da Silva
Only 30 appearances for Manchester United so far between them, but time is on their side.

John and Charles Sutcliffe
John was the goalkeeper for Bolton Wanderers in the 1894 FA Cup Final, and Charles turned out for Sheffield United an incredible 31 years later.

Clive and Bradley Allen
Bradley played for several seasons in the top flight for QPR, while Clive famously played for almost every club in England. Cousins Paul and Martin also played in Division One, but weren’t brothers.

Kolo and Yaya Toure
Yaya came to Manchester City to join his brother Kolo in 2010.

Luke and Stefan Moore
Both played Premier League football for Aston Villa, Stefan only making 22 appearances.

Paul and Ron Futcher
Division One appearances with Luton and Manchester City in the seventies for the twins.

Mark and Brian Stein
Not the only pairing to start out at Luton.

Ron and Peter Springett
Successive Sheffield Wednesday goalkeepers as one swapped for the other in a transfer deal in 1967.

Ray and Dean Wilkins?
I’m not sure whether any of Dean’s appearances for QPR or Brighton were in the First Division.

Jimmy and Brian Greenhoff
Jimmy made nearly 300 appearances for Manchester United and Leeds United, and Brian made nearly 500 appearances at the top level, with the two playing in the same Manchester United team for three years in the late 70s.

Stephen and Gary Caldwell
Both players began their careers at Newcastle United and have ended up with each other again at Wigan Athletic.

Dean and David Holdsworth
The twins who have managed against each other also played a single game in the same Bolton Wanderers side in 2002, as well as making top-level appearances for other sides.

In addition to the above, the following sets of brothers, most of who were unknown to me, all played for England, no less, at one time or another!
Arthur, Charles and Ernest Bambridge
Billy and Charles Clegg
Bertie and Rex Corbett
Arthur and Harry Cursham
Alf and Charley Dobson
Frank and Fred Forman
Fred and Jack Hargreaves
Frank and Hubert Heron
Alex Leake and Jimmy Windridge
Alfred and Ed Lyttelton
Frank and Reg Osbourne
Charlie and Tom Perry
Herbert and William Rawson
Alf and Charlie Shelton
Jack and Sep Smith
Clem and George Stephenson
AG and Robert Topham
Arthur and Percy Walters
Clause and Geoffrey Wilson

You can then also join in individual leagues, and I’ve got two tell you about:

1. ITFC Twitterati. This is for regular #itfc Tweeters. Please pick a team name which relates to your Twitter name, so it’s obvious who you are. The PIN for this league is 900.
2. Peter on the ITFC debaser.org mailing list has also set up a league. The PIN for that one is 815. Join your team in either or both!

Right, click here to pick your team (mine is above). At the end, join your team into Leagues 900 and/or 815.

Those who can, do. Those who can’t get a cushy job in the TV studio.

Isn’t it odd that Danny Baker’s few minutes on Match of the Day became for some people one of the most abiding memories of the World Cup? It wasn’t as if we didn’t already know what a strange, detached bubble the TV people live in, but to see them thrown into such stark relief was jaw-dropping. They were so uncomfortable to be made to look so inarticulate.

And it matters. David Hepworth writes that: “Obviously MOTD was not responsible for yesterday’s mugging [by Germany] but it does set the critical climate in which football is judged in this country. In this it has been responsible for encouraging complacency.”

What the MotD management should be reminded of (and they were by the Baker cameo) was that the programme is part of the entertainment industry, not the football establishment. That doesn’t mean it has to be flippant or funny, just to make the audience feel good for listening and watching. During the Germany match, the BBC’s performance was arguably worse than England’s. All around the country, people were angry at the team or the linesman, or getting worked up behind the team in blinkered optimism – whatever the case, emotions were running high and things were being thrown. But the commentators just continued making puns about Klose’s name which wouldn’t have (and didn’t) amuse my nine-year-old. How we needed Jonathan Pearce for this one. At half-time, there must have been millions of viewers who were pumped up, thinking: “we might be all over the place, but incredibly, we can still win this”. Cue the BBC’s glass-half-empty studio panel, the most miserable, boring bunch I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit and listen to. All the more irritating when you know Baker and Kelly are a phone call and a contract away. Christ, I’d rather have listened to James Corden.

UPDATE:
Don’t worry, I shan’t rant any more about how useless most of the good ol’ boys in the studio were, because it’s now been so eloquently done elsewhere. As Iain Macintosh says: “You expect this kind of thing from ITV. They’ve always been useless at football, but it doesn’t matter. Their coverage is self-funded, propelled by the adverts that they occasionally smear across the most important part of a match like a toddler’s snot. You don’t get mad with ITV for being rubbish because it’s like getting mad with a puppy for pissing on the carpet. It’s what they do and, in a way, it’s your fault for letting them in the house in the first place. But the BBC is supposed to be a bastion of quality, a stronghold against the forces of commercialism. They’re supposed to be good at this, for pity’s sake.” Read Iain’s excellent piece here.

For me, this has been the most interesting election campaign for many years – if not ever. The emergence of a third party nationally; having my house “moved” from a Tory stronghold into a constituency which could go any way; and having a son who’s old enough, at 9, to take a real interest in what’s going on …it’s all added up to a fascinating few weeks.

I’ve generally voted Labour in the past, and was happy to have done so, although Blair’s scary religious crusading would probably finally have pushed me away this time, if he’d still been around. But he isn’t, and I’m glad, because I believe we should vote for the constituency MP we want, and not have our vote swayed by national issues. In 2010, although Cameron gives me the creeps, I don’t have strong enough feelings either way for any of the party leaders to let that influence my decision, which will be based on the people we can actually vote for: the local candidates.

Firstly, I’m dismissing Nick Hillman, the Conservative candidate. He hasn’t been round canvassing (UPDATE: round here), his election literature has been bland to the extreme, and he wouldn’t answer the local and national issues at TheyWorkForYou’s job interview website (UPDATE: Nick has since explained why: see comments). I have no idea if that’s through laziness or whether Conservative candidates have been ordered not to get involved in initiatives which might commit them to something, but either way, cheerio Nick.

Much as I’ve found Old Holborn‘s campaigning extremely amusing, I think we should just say he’s done a great job raising the issues and leave it at that.

In Tony Juniper, Cambridge must have one of the Green Party’s strongest candidates anywhere. I like a lot of things he’s said, but I just get the impression that there’s too much of an extremist lurking in there for my liking.

Daniel Zeichner, for Labour, came to our road with his campaign team, and I appreciated the chance to speak to him. Some of his actions during the campaign have been a little odd though, and the policies he concentrates on in his campaign material are not the ones which concern me the most.

And then there’s Julian Huppert of the Liberal Democrats. Julian starts with a huge advantage, in my books, for having been the most serious opponent of the only local issue which has ever got me to join a campaigning group, and that’s the scandalous Cambridgeshire misGuided Busway. He’s also a scientist, and I think it’s imperative that we get more scientists and engineers into parliament. If Cambridge can’t send one, who can? Finally, although 2005 saw Cambridge return its first Liberal (Democrat) MP for almost 100 years, the MP, David Howarth, is considered to have done an excellent job. Although he’s standing down already, I’m happy that a LibDem MP can be as good for Cambridge as any other party.

So it’s Julian Huppert and the Liberal Democrats for me.

And lest we forget (and we shouldn’t), there’s a local council election going on too, and I’d already decided to vote to re-elect the excellent Stuart Newbold for the Independent Socialist Republic of Cherry Hinton.

The publication is 96 – yes, 96 – pages long, and has just three or four obvious advertisers, which wouldn’t have made a dent in its massive production cost, unless money means nothing to the marketing departments at NTR, BP and Monsanto (always possible, I suppose). And my goodness, although I’d like to say it’s worthy but dull, I couldn’t bring myself to read enough to say the former. But dull it most certainly is: 96 pages of trade-press journalism with a layout that looks suspiciously like my first efforts with Quark Xpress in about 1991. If every copy of the newspaper had it, that means well over a million of these have been produced, which means it must have used up about 200 tonnes of paper and substantial distribution costs. Just getting the thing written will have cost tens of thousands of pounds. Good luck to you if you were part of the writing or production team.

But as an idea, whose idea was this? And why? Just why?