The £2,924,622 was won on the weekend the country stopped caring. A syndicate of regulars from the Yew Tree pub in Manchester shared the cheque, the largest payout in pools history. The date was November 1994. That same weekend, on a Saturday night televised by Noel Edmonds, the National Lottery launched with five winners splitting £5,874,778 on its inaugural draw. The pools had peaked and been displaced in the same breath.

Football pools were never really about football. The Treble Chance, introduced by Littlewoods in 1946, asked you to pick eight matches you thought would end as score draws. Score draws counted for the most points; no-score draws less; home and away wins least. You wanted twenty-four. The maths punished favourites and rewarded the kind of ordinary dull Saturday in March when nine matches across the lower divisions all finished 1-1. Most weeks nobody got the maximum. Some weeks the dividend was £2.94 million.

Ten million people played every week at the peak. Ten million in a country of fifty-eight million. The coupon arrived through the door from a collector you knew by name, or you carried it yourself to the corner shop. You filled it in with a biro, thinking about Crewe versus Bury, and you handed it back with the right coins counted out. Saturday tea-time was a calculation. The teleprinter at five o'clock, the classified results read by James Alexander Gordon in that cadence which rose for the away score and fell for the home, and somewhere in the rhythm a person was working out whether their eight had come in.

The lottery undid all of this in eighteen months. It wasn't that the pools were unfair, or hard to play, or unpopular. They were popular. They had been popular for sixty years. They were displaced by something faster: a six-number ticket bought at the counter of the Spar, drawn on television by a machine, with a jackpot that started at seven figures and rolled over until it hit eight. The pools required you to think about football. The lottery required you to think about nothing.

Vernons closed its pools operation in February 1998. Littlewoods sold out to Sportech in 2000 for £161 million, a number that would have been laughable five years earlier. Ten million players became 830,000 by 2006, then 700,000 by 2007, then something smaller still that nobody publishes loudly. Thousands of jobs went on Merseyside, most of them women who had counted coupons in the great Art Deco building on Edge Lane that Littlewoods opened in 1938 and which has stood derelict since 2003.

The texture you can't recover is the weekly arithmetic. People who would have called themselves bad at maths could in fact do permutation calculations in their head, trading coverage for cost, balancing what their pension would stand against what Saturday might bring. They were running probability models in a ledger in the kitchen drawer. Then a machine drew six balls and the ledger closed.

I don't think the lottery was a worse thing. It pays out in ways the pools never quite did: lump sums, instant millionaires, a charitable arm that built half the country's velodromes. But it asks nothing of you. The pools asked you to look at the fixtures.

Yew Tree won the most. Yew Tree won last.

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