As ever I am beside myself with excitement about the forthcoming World Cup; and those that know me will be aware of my tendency to 'not do things by halves'. Since 1994, a happy combination of suitable time zones, total obsession and lenient annual leave arrangements has enabled me to pretty much watch every minute of every World Cup match throughout my entire adult life.
South Africa 2010 provides three massive challenges to this established norm:
• With South Africa and the UK effectively sharing the same time zone, matches are played during the afternoon and evening, thus ruling out the possibility to just sacrifice sleep for a month and watch during a night-shift – something which makes America's-hosted tournaments a cinch.
• I have just got married, and a month in front of the television is not a traditional honeymoon period for the wife.
• My current employer does not give me so much annual leave that I am able to take the necessary amount of time off and still have enough left for normal holidays. In 2006 (Germany) I was able to take 13 consecutive afternoons off without a grumble.
Now the second one has been taken care of. The wife is thankfully a highly tolerant young lady, and understands what she has married into. A nice week away prior to the tournament and my total surrender of TV remote for the past five days has bought me the necessary green card for what I am calling "Total TV domination month". The telly is mine, all mine.
That leaves me with the employer and time-zone problems. Neither can be solved overnight, so I can only be grateful for the delayed play era. Never before has stacking up World Cup games for watching 'as-live' been so easy. Hand in hand with my V+ box, the dream is still on. All I need to do is follow these simple steps:
• Record ALL games on V+ box
• Become a recluse at work from 12:30pm each day, avoiding taking part in or hearing any football related conversations
• Ignore the internet
• Ignore my phone
• Go home and watch 3 matches per day, back-to-back
South Africa 2010 provides three massive challenges to this established norm:
• With South Africa and the UK effectively sharing the same time zone, matches are played during the afternoon and evening, thus ruling out the possibility to just sacrifice sleep for a month and watch during a night-shift – something which makes America's-hosted tournaments a cinch.
• I have just got married, and a month in front of the television is not a traditional honeymoon period for the wife.
• My current employer does not give me so much annual leave that I am able to take the necessary amount of time off and still have enough left for normal holidays. In 2006 (Germany) I was able to take 13 consecutive afternoons off without a grumble.
Now the second one has been taken care of. The wife is thankfully a highly tolerant young lady, and understands what she has married into. A nice week away prior to the tournament and my total surrender of TV remote for the past five days has bought me the necessary green card for what I am calling "Total TV domination month". The telly is mine, all mine.
That leaves me with the employer and time-zone problems. Neither can be solved overnight, so I can only be grateful for the delayed play era. Never before has stacking up World Cup games for watching 'as-live' been so easy. Hand in hand with my V+ box, the dream is still on. All I need to do is follow these simple steps:
• Record ALL games on V+ box
• Become a recluse at work from 12:30pm each day, avoiding taking part in or hearing any football related conversations
• Ignore the internet
• Ignore my phone
• Go home and watch 3 matches per day, back-to-back
Embrace the technology Birchy... it's the only way. Until my injury I was staring down the barrel of all the games finishing by 5pm - total nightmare! Obviously, that's changed a bit now...
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