I am not a big fan of football, but I have invested money in two different sweepstakes involving the tournament ‘Euro2016.’ It’s funny how the British public seem to have these little at-work gambles on major sporting events. We don’t do it with other things do we? No-one is walking around the office with a big board with “EU REFERENDUM SWEEPSTAKE” on it, asking you to pay £5 and guess the percentage of voters who will say ‘YES’ next Thursday (with the person who gets the number right winning all the money.)
Actually, that sounds like a good idea. I may get to work on that and see if I can get any takers in the supermarket canteen tomorrow…
Anyway - back to Euro2016. I have two £2 entries in two separate competitions. One is run by Lee the Warehouse Manager at work; the other by Ted and Beryls’ son Alan. There are 24 teams in the tournament, my fortunes are attached to 2 of those teams, and they only have to reach the semi-finals for me to get my money back. So I figure I have a 3-to-1 chance of at least a small amount of success. (Don’t ask me how I arrived at those odds because it’s complicated and I was drunk when I did it.) I’m not a big gambler, but those odds sound okay to me, so I went for it.
Then I got Republic of Ireland in BOTH sweepstakes, so the odds have changed already. I looked up some details and it seems very unlikely that Republic of Ireland will get anywhere near the semi-finals, so my hopes are now allied to Croatia and the Czech Republic. Unless one of those teams puts a good run together I’ve effectively spunked £8 on a crap raffle.
RC 12-6-16
1730 BST
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