Despite the big freeze, it's time for a pool party

Tomorrow will be a throwback to the days of the 60s and 70s when avalanches of fixtures were postponed due to frost and snow and onto our television screeens appeared the musings of . . . the pools panel - a group of indeterminate wise owls who told us what would have happened if the weather hadn't intervened.

A lot of you reading this, for whom the Lottery has long since replaced the pools in the public consciousness, may not realise how important the football pools were back in those black-and-white days. Along with premium bonds, they were the best ways of getting rich quick and the excitement at totting up the number of points you'd got on that week's Treble Chance and hearing that dividends were going to be 'good' was almost overwhelming.

On weeks when all the games were played and all your predictions went wrong, you had no-one to blame but yourself. But when the weather was bad and all your predictions went wrong, there was always the pools panel. It was their fault. I'm not sure we ever really knew who the panel was back then. Today, it is manned by two 1966 World Cup winners, Gordon Banks and Roger Hunt, along with former Newcastle winger Tony Green.

But when I was a boy, I had visions of half a dozen ex-pros down the boozer at Saturday lunchtime, having a few pints and then moving on to the wine at about 3.30pm. They took the results of the top two divisions seriously and then started to lose interest. By a quarter to four, they were adjudicating on the outcome of Crewe against Grimsby and, with a wicked glint in their eyes, concluded it was a no-score-draw even though both teams had failed to concede less than two goals in each of their preceding 15 matches.

You could imagine them saying to one another: 'That'll fool them all', before ordering another bottle of Merlot and deciding Stockport would win their first away game of the season at unbeaten table-topping Port Vale. The power. Debating the merits of Charlton, Best and Law playing for Manchester United and then reaching the unfathomable verdict that Derby would beat them at the Baseball Ground. Home Win. Do me a favour.

Finally, the one who was the most coherent went to the phone-box in the snug bar and rang the results through to the BBC Grandstand office, where the legendary announcer Tim Gudgin read them out in his stentorian tones and a nation sighed in resignation as Torquay were unexpectedly given an away win at Rochdale.

I always wanted to be on the pools panel - just once. Just to say I'd done it. And then when the matches took place, just to see how wide of the mark the predictions were, proving yet again the unpredictability of sport. So in case some of you reading this are heading home to fill in your coupons for this weekend, take it from me that from among the games in doubt or already off, Chelsea will win at Hull and West Ham will beat Wolves.

If those matches do survive the weather, I'll check if I was right when I get home about 5pm. That's when Homebase shuts.

Why darts is failing to hit the target

The cyclical nature of the calendar is such that with alarming regularity the same unanswerable questions keep returning on an annual or biannual basis on the luggage carousel of sport. Every two years we wonder why the African Cup of Nations is not called the African Nations' Cup and nobody seems to know so we'll ask again in 2012.

Meanwhile every 12 months, the bewildered and baffled occasional darts watcher sits down to admire the skills on display at the Lakeside at Frimley Green, unable to work out exactly why there are two world championships within two weeks of each other, when the activity is constantly battling for a measure of credibility within more exalted sporting circles.

Boxing gets away (just) with having a variety of world governing bodies because it is a) a global sport and b) a billion-dollar industry. As long as the BDO and the PDC continue to chuck arrows at each other and operate in isolation, no matter how many times Phil The Power' Taylor wins one of the titles and AN Other wins the other, the relentless stand-off between the two bodies leaves darts the poorer, doing something that none of its true devotees would tolerate, namely squeezing a pint into a quart pot.

Reason to be cheerful . . .

On the basis that tiny things do indeed please tiny minds, there can be few more pleasurable ways of spending a midweek afternoon in January, than with a piping hot cup of tea, some semi-burnt toast with butter (non-fattening) dripping on to the plate and a couple of hours in front of the television watching a cricket Test match in Cape Town that for once has a decent crowd turning up to watch it. As the snow pixelated down from the leaden sky outside, the sun may have been beating out 39 degrees of heat from above Table Mountain but, in a strange kind of way, there's nowhere else I'd rather have been to watch Andrew Strauss and Co.