Damn, it's raining at Old Trafford

This wouldn't worry footballers, but cricket's a different matter.

Anyhow, while the PTS site is more or less dormant - or in its dotage - I was thinking about a good way of setting up a little virtual betting game for the European Championships. I'm looking for input about what you think might be fun throughout the competition and what kind of bets I should include.

Because I would be doing this on a simple spreadsheet and my Excel skills are far from excellent, I have to keep the format reasonably simple. So something as complicated as, say, giving everybody a chance to bet on exact scores on all the games would be completely unworkable. Any input as to what bets you would like to see would be more than welcome. And, I note that it's possible to co-own these blogs, so anybody who feels they might be able to contribute over the Euros, please let me know.

One way of simplifying it that appeals to me would be to theme it into red, white and blue teams - partly to put a British interest back into it - but mostly to keep it workable. Take the top seeded teams whose home colours are predominantly red, white and blue, limit a small selection of bets to these teams. When the top seeded red team gets eliminated, the game passes to the next highest seeded red team, until there are no more red teams. That way, there will never be more than 3 teams to bet on at any given time, and when it comes to the final, I'll increase the number of betting choices so that there are the same number of choices all the time. Bet this is clear as mud...let me know if you've any comments.