Has anyone ever noticed how little there is to do with regards to football between matches? Once you read the paper, rant like a nut on your favourite blog, post a few things on a forum and elaborately explain to anybody willing to listen why your team should have won, you are left with nothing to do. No football entertainment whatsoever.

For this precise reason - I can only assume - somebody invented fantasy football: a wonderful distraction that will keep you football-busy for another five to fifteen minutes per matchday. But these minutes can be golden when the wait until the next game is only a few hours long. For this reason, SoccerLens has created its very own private Euro 2008 fantasy football league and we want you to join it!!

The site that will host our league is none other than uefa.com who has created an uncharacteristically amazing interface for this summer’s festivities and who generously offer no prize for the winners. But that should not deter you; after all there is more to football than money: there are bragging rights.

So, just visit this link and sing up with your existing uefa.com account (obviously you can also make one if you need to), ignore the shameless advertising, make your team, go to ‘leagues’ and enter the code 34443-4490 to join SoccerLens’ league. There are a few members there already, but I don’t suppose you can have a lot of fun with ‘a few’ so we are highly ambitious and targeting ‘many’ members.

If you are still here (as opposed to having already gone to the UEFA site) there are a few things you should know before signing-up. The frst one is that we have already missed Matchday 1 which consisted of the last round of friendlies (the ones when France beat England). So, we have made Matchday 2 our starting point. All that means is that you should get your team ready for May 23rd.

And speaking of teams, since I find myself in a generous mood, I will share some knowledge with you before you pick you players:

• As, usual you pick a captain who scores double on each matchday.
• You pick twelve players, but note that one of them will sit on the bench and thus score no points
• You are only allowed one transfer per matchday, anything on top of that will be penalized by a two point deduction
• You are only allowed a maximum of three players from each country
• Make sure your team name is appropriate or UEFA will kick you out (funny is good, though )
• It might be useful to know that you can make as many changes as you like before the first deadline.

We could also make a Predictor league, if you are interested, so just let me know how tempting that sounds and we will set something up. See you at UEFA!