Monday, April 6, 2009

Australian Football Association

Wednesday 1st April 2009
After yesterday at the Café, today was a positive anticlimax. It wasn’t a bad day, it’s just that every time you have a good day and yesterday was one of those, you hope that it is the start of something big and sustained and this wasn’t either big or sustained.
Australia were playing a World Cup Qualifying Match against Uzbekistan tonight and Ian fancied watching it, the problem was that we couldn’t find out anything about the game apart from the fact that it was being played in Sydney.
We are talking real Football here, not that kick and rush game that they all support over here, namely Aussie Football.
We Googled Australian Football Association because every country has to have one otherwise the ruling body namely FIFA, wouldn’t allow them to play in the World Cup.
The first thing that came up was Australian Football Association and it’s entry in Wikipedia, Second and Third came the Australian Table Football Association.
After that it went from bad to worse, it must have listed every type of Football Association known to man, but no sign of Australian Football Association, organisers of the great game in Australia. After two pages with no joy we gave up looking there and looked elsewhere instead.
Eventually we checked out the TV Programme Guide for Foxtel, they didn’t have the time the game started, but they did have a programme start time of 8pm Eastern Time.
We have had to work round dealing with companies in the eastern states and are perfectly aware that they are two hours ahead of us, so it didn’t take much to work out that the programme started at 6pm over here.
Wrong, in WA we put our clocks back on Sunday morning, taking us back to normal time, unfortunately the Eastern States didn’t do the same and will not be doing it until next weekend, which means that there is three hours difference between WA and the Eastern States.
That is unless you are dealing with Queensland which doesn’t do Daylight Saving and has only been one hour different to WA during the Summer but is now back to two.
Because Queensland doesn’t do Daylight Saving, during the Summer it is one hour out of kilter with its other Eastern State neighbours, this must make it very confusing for them over there and means that there are three main Timelines that the country has to work to for half a year and for one week of the year they are even further out, it’s a shambles.
Anyway the upshot of all this is that after dinner Carolyn dropped Ian off at Stilts at 6pm so that he could watch the game, when he walked into the bar the second half had just started, Ian wasn’t totally impressed and when the barman pointed out to him that the Eastern States hadn’t changed their clocks back yet and for this week only the time difference was three hours, he still wasn’t totally impressed.
How is a country supposed to operate as a coordinated unit when the member states can’t even agree on a day when they should all synchronise their clocks, it’s a shambles.
According to the commentators the first half of the game was pretty dire anyway, so Ian probably had a result there. The second half was good to watch and Australia scored two goals, winning by two goals to nil, almost securing their place in the World Cup Finals.
Carolyn picked Ian up from Stilts at 7pm, they went home and had an early night.

1 comment:

Ganeida said...

Oh no! We don't have fox, live in Qld & regular tv did not televise this game so we had to wait for the national news to watch the highlights & learn we'd won the game after a dire first half I was pleased to miss.