Football games for a non computer generation

In a search for football games you could play on the Internet, a depressing array of words like scratchcard and lottery will vie for your clicking attention in mouse terms. Even worse, you might be unlucky enough to stumble onto such terms as "slime soccer". The slime here will be the stuff that comes out of your open mouth as you contemplate the horror (of disappointment). Briefly described as pacmen meets football with one player aside.

With slime soccer rating as possibly the pits that might be in your digital Christmas stocking, those of you old enough to have seen a computer for the first time when your kids got one will remember how the older generation had to get by for football games.

Remember blow football? A transparent pipe with a plastic mouthpiece for each player. Still at one player aside, this game doesn't need any other playing accoutrements beyond a plastic green sheet with white line markings. And we are talking the deluxe version here complete with the folds in the plastic pitch that you can't get rid of. You might have been one of the poorer kids who had to make do with the lino.

A search for football games would not be complete without a look at Subutteo. Now we're talking, this game has floodlights and everything. You even need to be able to exercise a little skill in flicking the players about. Probably marginally more than picking your nose.

I remember having several boxes of teams in smart colourful strips including the statutory Brazilian side every schoolboy needed before being a complete human being. When you look back in hindsight, every single box was the same apart from the paint job. What a bunch of mugs we must have been to buy more than one! The directors of the company must have needed helping off the floor in fits when the sales figures came through for extra teams sold.

What an absolute bummer when you accidently trod on one of the players, they would fold over and snap at the legs. Of course it would have to be Brazil to trash the whole box and wreck your best football game team!