Picture the scene, it’s 1974 and the World Cup draw has just been made, leaving a tearful 9 year old looking to Gerd Muller for solace. Our teacher, Mr Hicks had somehow contrived to give the prize of West Germany in the school’s summer project to Jim McKenna and pluck friggin Uruguay out the hat for me! The summer of ’74 was already a damp squib, just like my tearstained Gerd Muller sticker.
As it was to turn out, Mr Hicks and 1974 proved to be the making of me. I was the first name on his school team sheet each week and Kevin Keegan joined Der Bomber as my life long football icon along with Liverpool’s FA cup winning side and West Germany’s ’74 world champions.
Now like 
every young boy I knew in the 70’s, my mates and I played in a Subbuteo table football league. Away ties came with two course ‘Birdseye’ hospitality while Home games demanded tight match security to prevent regular pitch invasions from marauding siblings, usually resolved with a slip bolted bedroom door!
However, just like every Subbuteo league across the length and breadth of the UK, we couldn’t possibly play all of the hundreds of fixtures needed to complete the season. So we gathered round on our Space Hoppers, shared the Spangles and devised a cunning plan.
While I’m willing to bet that most kids turned to throwing a dice to meet this challenge, the inherent randomness of this frustrated me. Stealthily, I pinched the little Airfix paint pots from my elder brother’s model ‘Tirpitz’ box and got to work.
The wee black dots were replaced by numbers and each dice was coloured to reflect its value, with teams throwing 
once for each half using Green as the highest scoring and Red as the lowest.
Green ( 0 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 2 – 2 ) Yellow ( 0 – 0 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 2 )
Blue ( 0 – 0 – 0 – 1 – 1 – 2 ) Red ( 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 1 – 1)
Now as all of you budding mathematicians out there will testify, combinations of the above allow us to replicate any given match odds and/or team weightings. This only goes to prove that Maths and Football is a marriage made in Heaven and gave birth to what we know as the beautiful game!
My bedroom was home to dozens of orange and brown 70’s patterned wallpaper covered school jotters, jam packed with fixtures, results and tables from across Europe and beyond. I sometimes would ‘borrow’ my sister’s Petite typewriter to mimic Grandstand’s teleprinter and record a final score of Manchester United 1 Liverpool 3, even when the dice had actually produced a 4-3 victory for United!
However, you may be interested to know that a couple of years later, my dad bought me a new football game called ‘LOGacta’. This not only utilised much the same method described above but also provided the means to record results and league positions in a dedicated chart book as the season unfolded. My brother’s Airfix paints were perfectly safe now!