http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtwkRd6zHwg

I had that game Bobby. Used to put the cardboard pitch on the carpet, but it then had an uneven ridge in it. And with a deft flick of the counter (ball) i could hit the tv or the settee, but rarely the goal.

As for “designed specifically to suck all the joy and spontaneity out of the FA Cup”, isn’t that a definition of Adrian Chiles?

Wembley would have been right up my street as a nerdy kid, I suspect.

I was the proud owner of Wembley, a game designed specifically to suck all the joy and spontaneity out of the FA Cup. It didn’t actually bother to include any element that remotely replicated actual football, the games themselves being decided purely on the throw of a dice. As I recall you had to plough your way, round by round, through the entire FA Cup fixture list. You needed to start in early September just to get in a May final. No skill involved at all; the ties being decided by cunningly numbered dice biased according to league position. So a top flight team had a dice numbered, say, 6,5,4,4,3,1 played a non-league team who used a dice numbered, say 2,1,1,0,0,0. Upsets were rare.

The game is long gone (pity – Buy Now £65.00), but the the memory lingers on in the form of one dice, which resides in my drawer, a reminder of childhood. Absolutely useless however unless you need to throw either a 5, a 3 or a 0.

In doing so I decided to explore the website highlighted by Bobby String a year ago to the very day, and managed to find a game I’d almost entirely forgotten. Did anybody else have the Busby-approved Top Team Soccer? You started with a Monopoly style board, going round buying up players and building a W-M formation team. You then played the match with dice on a a grid marked out as a pitch, with the relevant players being allocated the appropriate sections of the pitch. Frankly – it was a bit dull, and confined to the wardrobe once Striker arrived.