Blaise Tapp: Late-night kick-offs test the commitment of football fans
If you work with others either remotely or in an actual office the chances are that the subject of sleep has cropped up more than once in the past couple of days.
The quality of one’s shuteye is a rare example of a personal detail that is acceptable to share with colleagues. Be it on a Zoom call or a close encounter in the staff kitchen, an enquiry about someone’s general wellbeing is often met with a ‘I’m alright…..although I haven’t been sleeping too well’ or the classic ‘I’m knackered’ when it is only 11am on a Monday.
I have long counted myself lucky not to be one of those millions of sleep obsessed folk as I’ve never really needed that much of it. While I have always needed more than Thatcher’s fabled four hours, for many years I used to live quite happily on between five and six hours a night. Back then I subscribed to the belief that sleep was for wimps, fearing that an early night would result in missing out on something interesting.
These days, I only really function if I get more than seven hours’ sleep, although in recent months I’ve been known to enjoy up to nine hours in my bed some weekends. This trend towards me needing extra time in the land of nod is the main reason why I’m not as excited by this World Cup as I have been about previous iterations.
The North American venues mean that many of the matches will kick off at an hour when much of the UK would ordinarily be tucked up, but many football fanatics, which is how I would describe myself, will no doubt aspire to watch every game, regardless of the hour they are shown. Not me. Even the idea of staying up until 2am to watch Scotland take on Haiti in their first World Cup finals match in a generation makes me feel cream crackered.
In years gone by, I would have lapped up a tie as obscurely attractive as Uzbekistan v Colombia but three in the morning? Not on your nelly! Mercifully all of England’s group matches are on at a relatively reasonable time of the day but I will worry about the times of our knockout matches if and when we get to that stage.
Over the next month or so, it is guaranteed there will be far more bleary eyed people in our lives than normal, none of whom will deserve any sympathy should they even think about complaining about being tired.