Watching the World Cup with the kids
Nigel is quite a big "football fan". Technically that is true, but in reality, he hasn't watched that many matches, and not a single live one, in a stadium or even on TV because firstly, most matches are at very late hours and secondly, two hours is just too long to spend in front of the screen.
So since the World Cup has come around, and it is supposedly the biggest sporting event in the world, I just had to let him get in on some of the action. And when his sisters got word that he was watching TV at 4am in the morning, they just had to have me wake them up too!
The first set of matches happened during the June school holidays, which was perfect. So we were watching football almost every night; but I had a simple system to ensure that we were all still mentally functioning the following day - basically pick a single match, because there are typically 2 or 3 matches at night (midnight, 3am or 6am, or midnight and 4am - can't get worse timings right?) and then, we would wake up just to watch the more "exciting" 2nd half. So essentially it was just taking 45 minutes of sleep away.
Of course, now that we are in the knockout stages, 45 minutes can drag to almost 2 hours given the extra time and penalty kicks, which happened when we watched Brazil vs Chile. That was so draining.
I remember the first time I tried to wake Shannon up (because she asked me to). She brushed me away and said "I want to sleep, don't disturb me". In the morning she questioned why I didn't wake her and I told her. She got very angry and told me not to listen to her and forced me to wake her the next night, even if she didn't want to. Such is the contradictory power of football.
So since the World Cup has come around, and it is supposedly the biggest sporting event in the world, I just had to let him get in on some of the action. And when his sisters got word that he was watching TV at 4am in the morning, they just had to have me wake them up too!
The first set of matches happened during the June school holidays, which was perfect. So we were watching football almost every night; but I had a simple system to ensure that we were all still mentally functioning the following day - basically pick a single match, because there are typically 2 or 3 matches at night (midnight, 3am or 6am, or midnight and 4am - can't get worse timings right?) and then, we would wake up just to watch the more "exciting" 2nd half. So essentially it was just taking 45 minutes of sleep away.
Of course, now that we are in the knockout stages, 45 minutes can drag to almost 2 hours given the extra time and penalty kicks, which happened when we watched Brazil vs Chile. That was so draining.
I remember the first time I tried to wake Shannon up (because she asked me to). She brushed me away and said "I want to sleep, don't disturb me". In the morning she questioned why I didn't wake her and I told her. She got very angry and told me not to listen to her and forced me to wake her the next night, even if she didn't want to. Such is the contradictory power of football.