FIFA Diary (Day 12): When Google Maps was fooled in Qatar too

 

FIFA Diary (Day 12): When Google Maps was fooled in Qatar too

FIFA Diary (Day 12): When Google Maps was fooled in Qatar too

Yesterday was different. I had to cover the Ghana vs South Korea match earlier yesterday. As the match was at 4 o'clock Qatar time, we thought we would be on time.

The interest in this match was less but as a journalist I try my best to cover matches of Asian teams. Another reason for watching this match was that I had to watch the match between Uruguay and Portugal because these two teams are also in Group H.

The match between Uruguay and Portugal in the 2018 World Cup held in Russia was quite an interesting experience for me. It was the same match in which Uruguay's Edinson Cavani broke Cristiano Ronaldo's dream of winning the World Cup by scoring 2 goals. Portugal was out of the World Cup after this match.

Since there was also a Brazil match tomorrow, many of my friends were going to watch the Brazil match while I had to watch Uruguay vs Portugal.

At 2 o'clock I reached the media center and watched the match between Cameroon and Serbia here. This match was tied 3-3. When I was watching this match, I thought that the match between South Korea and Ghana that I will be covering, I wish it was the same. And sometimes it just happens the way you want it to be.

The match between South Korea and Ghana was very interesting. Ghana won this match by 2-3 and the atmosphere of the stadium was very good in this match and it was a lot of fun to sit there and watch the match.

As I have written before, FIFA operates a media shuttle. The interesting thing in this regard is that the drivers of these shuttles do not know the way to other stadiums and this is where the problems start. How will you reach the stadium on time if your driver does not know the way to the stadium?

The same thing happened yesterday that our bus driver did not know the way to the stadium. They all go through google maps and don't have a proper idea of ​​the stadium. So when our driver got the bus stuck in traffic at one point, he called his supervisor. Because we Pakistani and Indian journalists understand Urdu and Hindi, we understood from the words of the driver that he did not know the way. But somehow we reached the stadium on time.

The match was good, initially the game was relatively slow but when the first goal was scored, the match became fun. After the match was over, I was interviewing the players in the mixed zone when my friend Siddharth got a call saying that we are in the media center, so let's go have dinner.

Everything shuts down at 3pm in Doha. In past World Cups, if we stayed up late at night, we could easily find something to eat.

Here in Qatar we try to do something similar. Wandering around looking for food, we landed downtown but everything was closed. Then we reached Souq Waqif which is the old bazaar here which has now been given a very modern look. There we found a restaurant open which the owner was from Kerala. There we had Kakar Chai and many other food and drinks available, and we also got biryani and shawarma here. When I got up from there, it was 4:30 and the call of Fajr had started and thus I reached the hotel at 5 in the morning.