Our grudging congratulations go out in typical British style to Dave and Angela Hawes of Wisbech, who just dropped a cool £101 million on the National Lottery.
In a spirit of desperate camaraderie well known to the couple’s friends and rellies, we’d now like to offer Chelsea fan and former club steward Dave a bit of simpering advice, in the hope that he might recognise our efforts and put a couple of hundred thou behind the bar down the Turk’s Head.
Firstly, Dave, don’t spend your money on two Fernando Torreses.
Second, always tick the box marked ‘no publicity’.
When my dad used to do the football pools back in the ‘70s, ticking the box always provided us with a warm glow of solace when his scientifically certain ‘Millionaire Maker’ perm plan, together with Mum’s lucky pin, consistently came up short of a ‘divvie’ on the ‘Treble Chance’.
Back in the day, doing the pools was a bit like surviving on the Titanic. Men did it by skill, women and children by luck.
We never did get a chance to Spend! Spend! Spend! To turn down the chance of a luxury box, like Dave, who wants to “stand with the real fans and watch my team play”, and “live near the ground and have Frank Lampard come over for a cup of tea.”
But then neither were we pestered for life by beggars, forgotten great uncles, long-lost schoolfriends, modern footballer neighbours and arsey nostalgic football writers.
Got, Not Got 
When I was six, I did the Pools for my babysitter, because she thought I knew something about football. She won £3.50, a small fortune for a pensioner in 1970s Lincolnshire, and so I was tasked with marking the crosses on a weekly basis, alas never to repeat my fluke start. As an adult, I stopped trying to guess the results and stuck with the same set of numbers every week. Didn’t win a bean. The implication of a double entry reward to fat, Watneys-supping football blokes was advertising genius.
Oh Lordie, don’t get us started. There’s tons on this in the book, from selection methods to the place of the pools in pop culture past… plus advertising campaigns even more shocking than Double Entries. It’s almost enough to make you want to get your hand in with a family game of Top Dividend…
D’ya know what? I’ve never done the pools. Well, I say never, my dear departed grandfather used to let me have a go every now and again as a kid. Even then I was driven by dogma, putting city down for a win every game and certain other teams down for huge defeats. I suppose in some way I thought that it might have some bearing on the actual result. Even to this day I can never bet on the blue boys.
i’ve lost a fortune on wishful and spiteful betting. Trouble is, I can always justify my decisions with cold, hard logic until I watch the games on Saturday night – and only then I realise, I’ve done it again.
Then there’s the old problem of assuming teams still have the same basic characteristics they did in 1979. Surely Brighton/Hull/Blackpool can’t seriously expect to get a result against mighty First Division Leeds/ Forest/Cov?