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Last year Kenny Dalglish's Liverpool side achieved a historic double at the price of my side winning the championship. Watching him put that goal in against Chelsea was painful but not half as painful as playing Scantron's football strategy based on every supporter, manager and footballer's dream.

Since the league was inaugurated in 1889, only five teams have done the double. That's an average of once every twenty years. If you play this computer-generated version, I reckon it'll probably take you as long. It's just so s-l-o-w!

You begin (once you've sat down and cracked the entry code system like some government code breaker) by managing a club firmly esconced in the Third Division with the aim of working yourself up via promotion or transfer to that elusive double.

You do this by selecting option after option from the considerable number of menus that exist. You'll need to select your squad each week, notify the police of the expected gate if you're at home and keep an eye on your weekly finances. You may need to borrow because of low gates, or to buy a player.

Each week you select a team from your squad. In the third division you'll find that pretty limited. I was offered Cardiff in my first season. They had a squad of about fourteen, two of whom were injured in the first three games. Any more injuries and I'd have had to buy because there seems to be no allowance for youth team players or second team members. A small gripe here - many of the teams seemed to be two seasons out of date.

The real problem comes when you really get stuck into teh game. The options system works quickly and efficiently allowing you to make all your selections swiftly, but when you come to the graphic representation of the game things begin to go askew.

The graphics themselves are pretty poor and the programmers apologise for this in the nice instruction manual that comes with the game. This I could take since they claim that to improve the look of the game would have severely eaten into the artificial intelligence aspect of it. However it also tells you to watch your team as often as possible to work out your strengths and weaknesses. This I found impossible because I just couldn't tell what was going on. Players kept disappearing and reappearing in huge glitches - either that or Cardiff had discovered some revolutionary cloaking device for eluding defences. Believe me, this game brings new meaning to the phrase 'a square ball'. Add to that the length of time each game took - about eight minutes - and you'll begin to realise that you'll need to prop your eyelids open with matchsticks if you want to get through a season.

This isn't all. Just about everything else is tediously time-consuming. I rapidly chose to go for a simple results printout only to find that that took nearly as long. Each time you select a team as well you'll be forced to sit and watch while 63 other sides pick theirs. This isn't so bad once, but you try it thirty times a season! Another break on the enjoyment is the league gates. At the end of the results, you're asked if you want to see everybody's crowds for that week. Whatever you answer, you get them anyway.

Playing The Double should have been absorbing stuff but it didn't take me long to get bored with it all. It's like watching paint dry most of the time. When you consider the speed of the thing and the limitations set on you for actually managing the team (rather than simply administrating and watching the finances) then you'll realise this is not a game for football enthusiasts. If it was this interesting winning the league and cup then football would have died a death long long ago when they were still playing in baggy trousers. Please, someone, produce a good football game!