Dr. Fox? Wasn't he the guy who could talk to the animals? Didn't he go around the world in 80 days? Or maybe he invented a time machine?

No. Dr. Fox is the proud author of this program which enables you to analyse the performance of any or all of the league football teams. Why? To win a fortune on the pools, obviously.

Someone has typed in a vast amount of data which can be called onto the screen in any form you wish. For example, if you want to see how Bristol Rovers stood in the First Division on any given date, you can call up the correct table. How many away goals they scored? No problem: simply click on the right menu. All the matches played by all the teams, down to the Diadora Football League or even the Beazer Homes or HFS Loans League are here.

So it's a powerful database. What you can also do is harness it using the Analyse option. This gives a statistical rundown of any team. Fixtures which have yet to be played can have their results predicted relative to past form.

You might be a doubting Thomas who believes that this system can't possibly work. Fair enough - the irrepressible Dr has thought of that, too. His program even enables you to compare results (which you have to input) with the forecasts it made, so you can see whether it's actually any good.

If you get Dr. Fox's 1992 Football Annual, you're going to have to input a fair bit of data yourself every week in order to keep it up-to-date. This has been made as easy as possible, but it's still rather a bind.

The conclusion must be that only true fans (or those who are absolutely desperate to win some dosh from Littlewoods) are likely to find it in them to tap away inputting data every Saturday evening instead of going out and drinking too much or even just getting a pizza and watching a video. If you need results, though, you can send off your disk to Dr. Fox with an SAE and two first class stamps and he promises to get a modified version back to you by return of post. all this on top of his 80 hour hospital week, too. The whole thing runs off the GEM interface, making it easy to use and pretty quick, too. It's not much to look at, but what it does it does well, and the data is fun to play with. As for winning the pools... well, it can't predict any worse than a human, can it?