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BLIND, STUPID AND DESPERATE
 
Famous victories:

Football League Division Two Play-off Final, 21/05/06, 3.00pm
Leeds United
versus
Watford
 
Bermuda black-out
By Mark Pomeroy

I have a current season ticket in the Rookery. I moved to Bermuda for work reasons three weeks ago. Talk about timing!

Having managed to find a fellow Hornet here (thanks again BSaD!), we discovered the imaginatively named 'Robin Hood' ex-pat bar was showing the game live – bring it on! So, twelve mighty Hornets, all decked in yellow, and four Leeds fans were all ready to go, with the nervous expectation from both sets of fans plainly obvious as kick-off approached, at 11am our time. However, someone evidently forgot to put money in the meter (or something similar!) and the satellite signal went down. Cue frantic, hurried phone calls to every single other bar on the island, only to realise that the whole of Bermuda was out.

So, a merry band of golden boys rushed back into town, piled into my office and crowded around my lap-top, listening to the rest of the first half on 5Live through the internet. The best moment being Jay's goal - scored exactly as the audio started! I promise you all, it feels incredibly strange jumping up and shouting like a loony to celebrate a goal three thousand miles away, let alone surrounded by files in your workplace!

At half time, we called round all the bars again and made our way in the bright sunshine to another pub that had the same idea of streaming 5live. The whole pub/audio experience was very bizarre, culminating when we all thought James Chambers had actually scored an own goal to make it 1-1! Cue much confusion amongst us all, and the two Leeds fans at the bar, until the commentator reliably told us it was 2-0 to the golden boys - SIT DOWN, SHUT UP!

In the end, we had to wait until 8pm that night to watch the replays on Sky Sports, after nine hours of utter disbelief and incomprehension, and one or two beers!

A $2,000 round trip now seems cheap at twice the price, and am naturally very envious of all those who made the trip across the Atlantic. The silver lining for us is that they replay in full all weekend Premiership games here (annoyingly annotated here to "EPL" for the US viewers – and you think "Premiership" is bad!)...that is, of course, assuming they sort out the satellite link before August....