Could you do better than Sven?

BY the time you read this we will probably know whether England's World Cup campaign will progress beyond the group stages or end in disappointment.

Given his team's lamentable second half performance against Sweden last weekend, perhaps Sven Goran Eriksson should have spent a bit less time advertising pasta sauces and more trying to turn Emily Heskey into a decent mid-fielder.

When a team plays badly everyone thinks they can do a better job. Don't believe me? After the England-Sweden match on Sunday, the Radio Five football phone-in was inundated with calls from fans who felt they knew better. Send Heskey home, play him up front, call up Lee Bowyer, give David Beckham his marching orders (yes, really) everyone, it seemed, had an opinion.

Of course it's easy when you are sat at home. After a few beers everyone is a potential England manager happy to discuss their opinion, often whether it is asked for or not.

Football management as a video game sounds like a non-starter. Critics reckon management sims are nothing more than glorified spreadsheets. Do the maths, they say, and you can win every time.

Of course, the bad ones really are like that. I can remember playing a football management sim on the Amiga some years ago and sweeping all before me. For fun, I swapped my second string keeper for my star striker - and watched dumbfounded as he proceeded to score 39 goals in just over half a season.

That experience almost put me off football management sims for good.

Two titles convinced me otherwise: Championship Manager and LMA Manager. By happy coincidence both are now available in new versions on rival games consoles.

Let's start with Champ Manager. Long said to be the best, most comprehensive, and most realistic football management title of them all, Championship Manager has been a long time coming to a console.

The problem was memory: or rather the lack of it. A PC could circumvent the need for vast amounts of RAM by dumping the Champ Manager database on its hard drive. Games consoles didn't have such a thing - until now.

Championship Manager on the Microsoft X-Box is every inch the same game as the fiendishly addictive version that has ruined so many relationships on the PC.

Slight amendments have been made to the screens because a television has a lower resolution than a computer's monitor. Also the control layout has been tweaked because, as yet, there is no mouse for the X-Box.

Other than that it is all here. There's the same player database with details for 100,000 players, managers and coaches; the same tactics; the same leagues (some 26 of them from all over the world) and the same problems.

Championship Manager doesn't let you watch the matches. Instead, messages are flashed up on screen and crowd sound effects enhance the big match atmosphere.

To be honest the lack of graphical finery has never let this title down. The ticker-tape commentary encourages you to let your imagination run riot and you don't have to watch badly animated stickmen racing around your screen to know who is playing well and who needs to come off.

Every game - bar the one below - that has tried a 3-D match engine has failed abysmally. Often the match you watch on screen bears no resemblance to what the game statistics tell you anyway.

And thanks to the X-Box hard disk you don't need an expensive memory card to save your progress in the game. It's not an easy game, Champ Manager. Nor is it a game for anyone with only a casual interest in football. It's a title for obsessives; for people who love nothing better than spending hours scrolling through lists of player names looking for that crucial new signing or who stay up into the small hours perfecting their tactics for the next match.

That said, there are plenty of them. More than three million copies of this game have been sold on the PC and I can see an awful lot more shifting on the X-Box. Me? I love it. Championship Manager is so good that I'd be prepared to buy Microsoft's new console just so I could play my telly.

LMA Manager. Publisher: Codemasters. Format: PS2. Price: £39.99.

THE original LMA Manager, published by Codemasters in October 1999, was a revelation - the first football management sim written for a games console that wasn't a load of old rubbish.

Now in its second-generation incarnation, the old master is back on the PS2 and it is gunning for Championship Manager.

The major difference between the two titles is LMA's use of 3-D match highlights. As I have already said this could have been a disaster.

Thankfully, the team behind LMA spent months perfecting a match engine that actually does represent what is going on in the game.

Matches in the original PS One LMA were played out by the kind of stickmen more often seen in Command & Conquer. This time around they owe more to the FIFA games than any real time strategy title.

Yes, the lack of a hard drive means LMA makes do with fewer players (17,000 or so) and fewer leagues but do you really want to manage a bunch of no-hopers in the Portuguese second division anyway? Thought not.

Useful mods for the PS2 version are a wider European transfer market and bigger squads so you don't have to off load a couple of honest toilers to make way for a star player (finances permitting).

There are a number of areas where LMA has the edge. The graphical interface is better being purpose-designed for the PS2 controller rather than re-engineered for an X-Box pad from a PC mouse set-up. Action replays are also well presented and interesting.

To be honest, it's as big a time-waster as Champ Manager and every bit as much an essential purchase if you happen to own a PS2 instead of an X-Box.

And if you happen to be in the fortunate position of owning an X-Box and a PS2? Well the answer is easy: you will just have to buy them both.

CHEAT OF THE WEEK

STILL playing the PC version of Champ Manager (2000/01) and need a decent lower league keeper? Trying poaching Dean Williams from Telford. Alternatively if you want some power up front, Derek Adams from Motherwell could be the answer to your goal scoring prayer.

Published: 07/06/2002