Championship Manager 2011's main strength lies in its slightly aloof nature however – beneath the icy blue cool of the menu screens, you'll find a pretty kooky technicolor heart. (But that won't stop you celebrating when your hot young trequartista lamps one in from outside the box.) Licensing is always a pricey and thorny issue in this genre – most big leagues are represented (as well as some lesser ones.) One glaring omission is the MLS – I'm sure Vladimir Yakovlev playing in the Kazak Super league could do a job in the centre of the park for me, but I'd probably rather D-Beck came home. As a stripped down version of a PC sim, it plays well – tactics and substitutions are easily performed with a drag of the finger, all the while accompanied by the familiar creeping sensation that all your tinkering will ultimately count for nothing.

Matches kick off with the minimum of ceremony, your overpaid prima donnas rendered as radar blips that are accompanied by text commentary. Portable versions of both Football Manager and Championship Manager have always been slightly clumsy retreads of their PSP incarnations, and it's encouraging to see a game being built from the iGround up, taking full advantage of the touchscreen – players can be dragged across the pitch, their icons floating millimetres above the finger so as to not to obstruct the view, and access to your mailbox, squad and upcoming fixtures is never more than a couple of clicks away. If it's good enough for a set of furious cartoon birds it's good enough for Gareth Bale.

It's to Eidos' credit that it's stripped everything down this year and given us a much cleaner interface – and this time we're in landscape. The game that first made hulking great databases sexy first hit the iphone in 2009, sporting a decidedly goofy old-school interface, coupled with the use of a rather unwieldy portrait orientation.

Championship Manager 2011 is the third title to hit iTunes in as many years.

Oh, and now all of this is happening on the bus to work, apparently. You open the morning's newspaper, only to hear that one of your well-paid fake charges is spoiling for a move to another fake club, and that you're about to get the fake roasting of a lifetime by some fake journalist regarding your shortcomings after a piece of unseen binary code for some reason conspired against you.

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