Can we assume that you know the bulk of the back-story by now? Suffice to say that the Football Manager franchise is the work of those who built up and made great the Championship Manager series, leaving the latter franchise with the same publisher but different programmers.

And this is their second stab at it. The first? Well, let's politely say that the size of Football Manager 2005's victory over Championship Manager 5 was sufficient to make us wonder whether the latter would survive at all.

Fortunately, Championship Manager 2006 has improved things somewhat. First and foremost, the bugs that crippled the game's last iteration to the point of making it simply unplayable have been pretty much ironed out. Secondly, it flows better, works quicker, and while the menu is still too cumbersome for our liking, the detail embedded within it is that much more accessible.

But the importance of the brand name has meant that the developers are effectively straitjacketed in what they can do. Championship Manager has always been about statistics, about the detail and about losing weeks of your life to what, to outsiders, looks like a jazzed-up Excel spreadsheet. Football Manager 2006 has that area of the market completely cornered, unsurprisingly, yet rather than attempt to tread its own path, Eidos has ordered a game that shoots for the past glories of the Championship Manager games, yet unsurprisingly comes nowhere near.

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Examples? Well, the whole match-day experience is simply a tension-less affair. Sure, you can choose the level of highlights, you can vary your tactics and you can watch a sporting attempt at a good visual realisation of the action, but you never feel engrossed in it.

This reviewer has spent many late nights waiting for a piece of commentary text to declare that his team had just scored a vital goal, and thus is as willing as most to get sucked in. Yet with Championship Manager 2006, it simply wasn't happening. Neither was the willingness to spend hours browsing names of players in the hope of unearthing a gem. Put simply, this is all stuff that Football Manager 2006 does so much better.

The irony of all of this is that, in its own right, Championship Manager 2006 isn't too bad. It's not without the odd charm, and once the learning curve has been surmounted, there's an interesting and diverting strategy game at the heart of it.

Yet football is a cruel game. And, quite simply, the team with the best players, the most experience and the most know-how isn't the one behind the controls of the Football Manager franchise. Upsets in favour of the underdog come along rarely, and this isn't one of them.

A better stab at recapturing the glories of a once-great name. But ultimately, it's not the big name in the genre anymore, and rightly so.