A spot the ball game with a brand new twist for the 21st century!

Spot the ball is a great British tradition left over from the heyday of seventies and eighties football. If you remember John Toshack, Bobby Moore and Billy Bremner then you will have played spot the ball and doubtless have filled out your pools coupon into the bargain.

Did you use a pin, or were you one of those that drooled over the picture for hours trying to look for clues as to the exact position of that elusive invisible football? The game seemed to wane in popularity about the time that Liverpool stopped winning every piece of silverware on offer. Perfect time of course for somebody to ressurect it with an innovative idea for our present times.

Enter the brand new spot the ball competition - called Football Fortunes. This time you can abandon your pin because you will have 6 footballs to choose from, one of which is the right one. Like the familiar 21st century game of lottery that everybody knows and loves, the solution is actually a sequence of numbers. The difference to the lottery though is that the numbers are not just a matter of chance.

You use your skill and judgement to decide which football is the original football, and and with 6 to choose from that is a helluva lot easier if you know where the football is of course! OK, there is the small matter of eliminating the five red herring footballs. I can see football fans having arguments over this. Are the players looking at the football or the other players? That’s for you to decide

Spot the ball is now effectively a sequence of numbers which means you can simply choose the numbers lottery style instead of fretting over the pictures if you prefer. There are seven pictures in a game and the the top prize of £25,000 instantly is a BIG prize, so it must mean that the competition is not quite as easy as it looks.

One really big thing about this competition that beats other forms of trying to win big money is that there are photographs that can be verified independently and no one has to trust that a roulette ball or or a scratchcard has been chosen by another computer fairly. Aside from actually betting on an outside event, this is one of the few competitions that can boast this certainty yet provide prize money nearer to a lottery win than the relatively small ratio that betting stakes produce in comparison to the stake.

Good luck all you spot the ball enthusiasts out there. Don’t get too hot under the collar arguing about which is the right football. And by the way, those with a taste for nostalgia - there's another idea from the past - lucky seven!