It had been a while since we had played a strip game together but there were eight of us in the house, all watching England in the quarter finals of the Euros, a few weeks before the end of term.
"This is shit" Sinead moaned. England were 1-0 down to Slovakia and showing no sign at all of coming back.
"Let's face it, England are going home and for the rest of the tournament we'll just be neutral spectators and it'll be boring as hell" Matt said.
"Then how about we make it interesting? There's 8 of us right, so from the next round we could make it a strip game," Sophie suggested.
The guys ears pricked up at this. Ok, it probably helped they had started drowning their sorrows before the game had even ended, but still. We had played plenty of strip games before, but we hadn't bet on sports.
"How would that work?" I asked.
"How about we each pick a team at random and the winner of each match gets a prize from the loser?" Sophie suggested.
It took another half an hour to work out the rules, but basically we ended up with this:
We would each be allocated a team at random. For the quarter finals, each match would be boy vs girl. We would put the first named teams into one pile and second named teams in another: the boys would draw from one set and the girls from the other. We would watch all the games together in the house, but only the players whose teams were playing would strip. That would heighten the embarrassment as you could easily end up being the only one naked.
If your team scored, you picked an item of clothing for the opponent to remove. If one of your players got booked, you lost an item of your choice. If one of your players got sent off, you had to instantly get naked for the rest of the game. Each player was allowed 4 items of clothing - top, bottoms, bra/socks and pants.
The winner(s) of each game would get to dominate the loser(s). For the quarter-finals it was oral sex, the semi-finals would be full sex, and the final would be no-holes-barred. A butt-fucking basically.
If a match went to extra time, each player could put one item of clothing back on. If it went to penalties, there was no such proviso: there was a very good chance both players would end up naked during the shoot-out.
If your team lost, then you got co-opted into the winners team for the next round. This meant that each match would have an even number of boys vs girls.
By the time we had settled on the rules, England equalized. Jude Bellingham had rescued the hopes of an entire nation.
"No fucking way! I thought they were totally done!" Sinead whooped.
To be honest, we were all in shock. In the midst of the most depressing England performance ever, we had tried to invent a way to make the rest of the tournament interesting. Now though, our team was still in it.
It was 1-1 at full time, with extra time still to come.
"So who fancies a little wager on the winner of this match?" Matt suggested.
There were murmurs of agreement, no one wanted to be chicken, but we needed a game.
"How about this?" Poppy suggested. "Everyone has to flip a coin. Heads, you're England. Tails, you're Slovakia. Losers get naked for the rest of the night?"
That was simple enough. Although on paper England were huge favourites, their performance for the first 90 minutes had been terrible. It was basically 50:50 who was going to win anyway. There were eight of us and Matt pulled out a coin. Matt, Sophie and Jess got tails and were supporting Slovakia, the other 5 of us were cheering for England.
