45 FOOTBALL

A football puzzle with more than one right answer

Every day is checked before it ships: it has to be hard, and it has to be solvable more than one way.

Play today's puzzle

What "solvable" means here

A day only reaches the calendar if a search over hundreds of plans finds at least five genuinely different ones that work, and if the best of them still fails often enough to be worth three attempts. On a typical day nine distinct plan families work, the best of them succeeds about 55% of the time, and sending the team out unchanged succeeds about 10%.

Which means there is no single trick

You are not hunting for the one move the designer hid. You are looking for a plan that beats this particular opponent, and there are several. Two people can solve the same day completely differently and both be right, which is most of what makes it worth arguing about afterwards.

And it is honest about failure

When a plan fails, the game tells you which part failed and what the opponent did about it — the duel, the numbers on both sides, and the minute it happened. You are never told you were simply wrong.

Recent puzzles

• #1 — Brighton & Hove Albion v Brentford, BHA 1–2 BRE at half-time
• #2 — Arsenal v Ipswich Town, ARS 0–1 IPS at half-time
• #3 — Egypt v Morocco, EGY 0–1 MAR at half-time
• #4 — Manchester United v Ipswich Town, MUN 0–2 IPS at half-time
• #5 — Hull City v Arsenal, HUL 1–0 ARS at half-time
• #6 — Chelsea v Leeds United, CHE 0–2 LEE at half-time

Play today's puzzle