By happy chance, I just happened to switch on my TV early this afternoon as a re-run of this year's Champions' League Final was starting on Beijing Television's sports channel.
I had been planning to stay up all night to watch it live with fellow footie fan The Chairman, but.... rather as David Niven once memorably said of Errol Flynn, "You always know exactly where you stand with The Chairman..... because he always lets you down."
Yep, the swine baled on me at the last minute, claiming tiredness, work pressures, blah-blah-blah.
I made a heroic effort to stay out on my own until the kick-off (2.45am for us here in China), but - having started foolishly early with some gal pals in The Bookworm - I was wilting badly by 1am. A Chinese guy in the Pool Bar was confident the game was going to be shown live on the national sports channel CCTV-5, so I thought that, rather than taking a chance on one of the bars in my neighbourhood being able to work out which the right satellite channel was for English-language coverage (this has become more and more complicated of late, and even would-be 'sports bars' like The Rickshaw have been struggling mightily to find the game amid the hundreds and hundreds of obscurely labelled channels at their disposal; my favoured local haunt, Room 101, has repeatedly proven to be a complete disaster at this!), I would endure the Chinese commentary in the comfort of my own home.
Alas, when I got home, I found that the game was not on Chinese TV after all. However, I did get sucked into watching Rafael Nadal playing tennis for an hour or two instead (it turned out, I think, to be a random montage of his recent semi-final defeats; Chinese sports coverage is often unfathomably weird in this way); so, I ended up staying up most of the night, feeling completely wrecked the next day, and not seeing the game.
And, needless to say, despite my best efforts, I did not survive very far into the subsequent day before mischievous sports fans had leaked various crucial elements of the story to me (Brits of my generation will of course remember a classic episode of '70s sitcom Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads where the two sports-mad drinking chum protagonists spend an anguished day attempting to avoid hearing the result of an England international game so that they'll be able to enjoy it 'as live' on TV later that night - many of us have been in similar situations over the years, and it is quite impossible).
I did catch the game in its entirety a day or two later in the Pool Bar, but it was on rather late, and I wasn't giving it my full attention (far too much else going on in PB at 2am on a Friday night/Saturday morning!!). I'm glad I finally got to watch it properly today, even though it was without the keen thrill of uncertainty that makes a live match so riveting.
And now, of course, we have the European Championship tournament about to get under way - another 3 weeks of middle-of-the-night football!! God help me!! Since England aren't involved this time, I'll probably be rooting for Croatia or the Czech Republic....... and saving the all-nighters for a handful of crucial games. Most of the time, I think, daytime re-runs will be fine. Well, that's my plan anyway..........
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