Having discovered that the vital England v. Croatia football game was to be on in the early hours of this morning - while I was still in the western Chinese city of Chongqing on business - my challenge then became to find some way of watching it.
Bars are extremely thin on the ground in Chongqing (foreigner-friendly type bars, anyway). There were none at all in the end of town where I was staying. So, there was no prospect of being able to stay up all night in a divey sports bar (as I had been planning to do in Beijing) to watch the game with a nice insulating layer of alcoholic euphoria to ward off the likely disappointment.
However, I was staying in an unusually upmarket, Western hotel - which had a full array of cable channels on the TV in my room. Including StarSports and ESPN. I watched the 'Football Focus' preview programme on ESPN on Tuesday evening, and they confirmed that the game was going to be on that channel at 4am local time on Thursday.
All I had to do was stock the mini-fridge with cheap local beers from a roadside stall somewhere, set the alarm-clock for 3.45, and try to turn in early-ish on Wednedsay night. Sorted.
Except that I was so keyed up with anticipation that I woke before 2am (after about 3-and-a-half hours sleep) and couldn't nod off again. And then - when game time arrived (or pre-game warmup time, at any rate) - I discovered to my horror that ESPN was in fact showing basketball. And not even the NBA - I could understand if it were The Rockets..... but it was just some crappy college game. This is not the first time I have run into such a problem. Quite often, China will have its own - unannounced - variation to the rest of ESPN's offering: sometimes because one of the Chinese terrestrial networks has paid for exclusive domestic coverage (happens quite a lot with the football); sometimes for no obvious reason at all.
I flicked over on to sister network StarSports to see if it might by some chance be showing on there. But no - they had just started showing the staggeringly unimportant clash between Italy and the Faeroe Islands!! That's just taking the piss - I was starting to feel seriously victimised here. I hopped madly around the other channels - mostly local Chinese ones - in hope of finding the game (without the benefit of intelligible commentary, but what the hell) on one of those. But no: Chongqing doesn't get BTV-6 (the Beijing Television sports channel, and my usual default position for watching sport at home), and none of the seeming dozens of provincial channels were showing sport. The national sports channel, CCTV5, looked like being my last chance. France v. Ukraine. SHIT!
But then I flipped back to StarSports for one last check and discovered that they (rather than ESPN) had switched to the England game about 1 minute before kickoff.
Why is it so ruddy hard to watch a game of football in this country?
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