World Cup: Beating the deadlines

Editor's note: I love Barnes's flourish up to a point; I would have loved to be in Germany to go through the agony Barnes and his mates are going through!
All the same, I feel, this is an eye-opening read for those journalists who are tourists in Germany during the football World Cup.

By Simon Barnes
Doing sports journalism well is the aim of most of us in the trade.
When it comes to a World Cup, doing it at all is the height of any realistic person's ambition. The odds are stacked against you from the start: getting to the groundis in itself a triumph, involving long-distance train travel, intense crowds and erratic busses.
Then come the usual excitements of delivering copy to a silly deadline: yesterday was an exception and a real treat, in that I was able towatch the game before writing. That means you actually know the result before you start: useful in a game in which Australia, 1-0 down, scored three times in the last eight minutes.
Normally, we are required to file "on the whistle", which means you write while the match is actually going on. I usually start hitting the keys afterhalf-an-hour: after that, I grab the match in stolen glances. My opposite number on The Guardian, Richard Williams suggests that this is why we deserve thesalaries we get paid: because we are so willing to make ourselves look idiots on so many occasions.
I shall be back to this on-the-whistle stuff tomorrow, if I get the ticket I am wait-listed for at the Germany-Poland game. World Cups generally undermine racial stereotypes: any one who thought that people from the Far East were inscrutable had his mind changed pretty rapidly when watching Japan and South Korea play in the last World Cup.
Which brings usto German efficiency.
Most journos work from a laptop that has a battery life of about fours hours. That's not quite enough to be comfortable when covering a football match: there is very little margin for error. For example, yesterday I foolishly lost 500words by stubbing my finger on the wrong button in my creative frenzies.
After that I had problems sending the stuff over by phone. I could have done, then,with a working power-point. In press boxes across the world these days, there are always power-points. You plug your laptop in and so you are safe.
Naturally, they provided power-points at the World Cup stadiums: it's just that they don't work. Not if you are British, and are using a British continental adaptor. In Munich, the sockets had rubber collars that pinged your plug out: in Kaiserslautern, they had hard plastic collars, and you couldn't plug in at all. I can plug in at hotels and in the work-rooms: but in the stadium itself, no.
This does not reflect well on German efficiency. But let me boast about my own efficiency. Today, since I was not going into a match, I went into Mannheim and bought myself an extension lead.
This, being German, I trust, will plug into the German stadium sockets: and I can then plug my computer into my new lead. And I must say, I am more proud of this lead than of anything I have written from the tournament so far.
I think I should get an award for it: extension lead of the year. Believe me, every piece we write from the event, however bad, is a triumph.