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There's more to being a manager than makking sure your team eat Shredded Wheat

Now to be really true to the licence, this game would have to be very dull, almost impossible to comprehend, and fairly crap. It would begin with a team selection feature where you had to pick out the most uninspiring dullards you could find. Then there would be a graphic interlude, where you could watch your players run aimlessly up and down the pitch whilst the opposition rattled in a few goals. Finally there would be a press conference, where only an air of inscrutability - and the correct choice of excuses - would see you live to fight another day.

But no. In actual fact GTSC is a very enjoyable game, with extensive feature, excellent looks and a great degree of tactical involvement. So it's probably safe to say that it has nothing to do with Graham Taylor at all then, apart from those two - easily ignored - words on the box. Mind you, Krisalis do maintain (somewhat inadvisedly, really) that Graham was actually involved in the development of the game. Hmm, so what's what he was doing when he should have been preparing for Sweden.

Opening with one of those icon-based menu screens that we're all getting mighty suck of (thanks a lot, Footballer Of The Year - grrr), the path is clear to a veritable feast of options and info. Apart from a few transfer market sorties to the numeric keys, everything is controlled with the mouse. Although this makes the selection procedure very user-friendly, the large number of sub-sub-sub-menus often calls for some major volleys of button clicking. This gets a tad annoying, but what do you want, a servant to take care of the controls for you? Yeah, me too.

While it's the abundance of menus that houses all the tactical and statistical features that make this ame a winner, the best feature of all is the (largely irrelevant) animated match sequences. These don't serve any practical purpose, unless you're into the idea of watching out for weaknesses in individual sprites so you can put that player - once you've worked out who it is - in for extra training. Yeah, right. What these action sequences do provide, though, is plenty of entertainment. If you're no friend of tension you can opt to not watch the game, or indeed watch a totally different game instead (Crystal Palace are always a laugh), but you'd really be missing out. You can't help but become engrossed, shouting abuse and encouragement at the screen and wishing you could grab a joystick and take control (you can't, though you can make substitutions).

The one real problem with GTSC involves the buying and selling of players. Wheeler-dealing on the transfer market has always been seen as the key to success in games of this type, yet there's no wheeling and precious little dealing going on here. The other clubs won't accept anything less than the listed value foor their players, though they'll accept that figure without hesitation. The directors of your club won't allow you to offer any of your players for any less than the listed sum either. This is a problem, since players on the transfer market are likely to dead sooner that bought. Selling a handful of crocks to buy a half-decent player seems the only real way to build your squad, but it just ain't possible. The vast repertoire of other options (e.g. training) goes some way towards transcending this little problem.

Strategy games are, on the whole, quite hard to quantify. The only way to test a strategy game's appeal is to see how long you can play it for before getting bored, and here GTSC came up trumps. After a shaky start propping up the league with York City, I took control of Walsall and led them, over a great many hours, to promotion to Division 2 (that's Division 3 in old money) and the league cup quarter final. Yowsa! I would no doubt have gone on to win the treble, but the night watchman came round and threw me out. Oh well, as long as no-one remembers to ask for the disks back...

Any niggling flaws are outweighed by a stockpile of features, and match sequences destined to have you on the edge of your seat. Just pretend it's named after a different Graham Taylor.