Arsenal America

I thought I’d relay this story, as it’s both agonizing as well as amusing.

As many of you know, I’m now in Taichung, Taiwan. There is a large ex-pat population here, so a couple of the pubs show EPL matches on a regular basis. So I ventured over to one of them this evening (the Arsenal match started at 11 p.m. here) to catch the winner. I watched as Newcastle finished off Chelsea, setting things up perfectly for a Championship clinching moment at the Lane. So I sat there and waited for them to flip on the Arsenal match…and waited…and waited…but they couldn’t find it.

So the owner comes in. He checks the list, flips it to the correct channel, except there’s no match on. While scanning the channels, he says “I hope there aren’t any Arsenal supporters here”, then looks directly at me and goes “Oh sh*t”. He then explained to me that the satellite channel the Arsenal match was on only works about half the time, and this night happened to be the bad half. He even called another pub to check and see if they were getting it, but they had the same problem. He profusely apologized to me and even bought me a beer.

So by the time I finished the beer (I don’t turn down free beer, period), it was already 11:30. Mind you, I had guzzled said beer down in about a minute flat, so I was rushing things. I literally ran home to my apartment, doing what is normally a fifteen-minute walk in five minutes. I quickly started my laptop back up and then waited…and waited…and waited some more. My laptop had glitched on startup. Meanwhile, I’m screaming every curse word in the book, just praying that Sp*rs hadn’t scored, as I probably would have jumped out the window. Finally, after an eternity, it started working, so I went to Soccernet and got the Gamecast going. I saw that it was 1-0 to the Arsenal and all was well again.