Flicking to kick our way to dreams of Wembley epics

There was no good reason that Subbuteo should ever have been a success; little one-inch footballers mounted on a half-sphere base that you flicked to kick with your finger, across a piece of green cloth measuring not far off 60 inches by 40 inches.

But back in an era when electronic games weren’t even a pipedream, this game described as table football (ignoring that very few homes ever had a table big enough for the actual cloth) was just the bee’s knees for boys with sporting dreams.

Ten outfield players on the circular base and the goalkeeper at the end of a long stick which you hook under the goal nets; they were completely homogeneous in shape and colour; pink-faced players with arms away from their sides, goalkeeper permanently stuck in a diving position or ready to tip the ball over the bar with arms outstretched in perpetuity.

And the ball itself – several times the size of the players because if it were to be kept in proportion, it wouldn’t be the size of a shrivelled pea.

Perhaps there were really good protagonists who mastered the art, but most of us who loved Subbuteo had little or no control over the flicking action – to the point that, frequently, player and ball were flicked like a cannonball fired from a cannon, off the green baize and into orbit.

Occasionally into the sink – or a pot boiling on the range.

The idea was that players could retain possession as long as the figure they flicked made contact with the ball and that the ball didn’t subsequently hit an opposing figure, although the same figure cannot be used for more than three consecutive flicks.

But that’s like telling pub players full of beer that the theory of good darts is to consistently knock in a nine-dart finish.

So, with Subbuteo you had a game where the players looked absolutely nothing like the stars they supposedly represented, playing with a ball that was several times their size on a piece of green cloth that couldn’t fit anywhere but on the floor – and yet we loved it.