Bundesliga rescheduling

Tell the average German male that it's 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, and there's a fair chance he'll reach - Pavlov's dog-style - for the remote control. For the better part of four decades, the Sportschau, German public television's football highlights show, has ruled this particular time-slot like Kim Jong Il does North Korea.

So imagine my shock and dismay last weekend when I flicked on the idiot box and settled in for a nice hour-and-a-half of vegetative sporting bliss, only to find myself watching Greuther Fueth, Duesseldorf and Paderborn.

With the Bundesliga having shaken up its weekend scheduling, fans are forced to sit through a half-hour of second-division matches before catching up with the results from the top flight. Now, I've got nothing against lower-league football when consumed live, but watching tiny recorded images of journeymen players slogging it out on bumpy provincial pitches ranks pretty high on my list of things for which a human life is too short.

And there was a further nasty surprise in store for me last Saturday, once the Sportschau turned its attention to the big boys. Having endured five lethargic games, in which the highest ranked team from last season was fourth-placed Hertha Berlin, I figured my reward would be the day's top encounter between Hoffenheim and Bayern Munich.

What I got instead was an advertisement and the closing credits.

With this season's introduction of a late premier match that starts at 6:30 p.m., the game I actually most wanted to follow was being played simultaneously with a show that had me throwing Pringles at my screen in frustration.

It was, I realized, the end of both an era and a small but somehow significant part of my own weekly routine.

Objectively speaking, the loss shouldn't be that great. Even in its heyday - before the introduction of Friday and Sunday games - Sportschau was a half-baked imitation of England's "Match of the Day."

The match commentators tend to be verbose dullards who intone stuff like, "The need to try harder to score." And the in-studio guests too often consist of ageing functionaries whose last sporting achievements came when Helmut Kohl was chancellor. (Yes, that means you, Franz Beckenbauer.)

But there were something solid, comforting, indeed, peaceful about this weekly exercise of mediocre sports journalists going about their jobs.

Moreover, the timing was perfect. The Sportschau didn't infringe on your Saturday plans. It worked equally well as a post-script to an afternoon of drinking beer or a prelude to an evening of drinking more beer. Heck, you could even have a beer or two while you found out what happened a few hours before.

The PR people for the Bundesliga and the private cable network Sky -- two entities that profit enormously from the new staggered Saturday schedule -- have been busy reassuring us that the show will go on. The ratings for the season's first Sportschau, they crow, were up over 2008.

But that was probably because many viewers were, like myself, too stupid to figure out what the scheduling changes would truly mean. How many of them are going to remain loyal to a program in which the final look at the table doesn't include the results from one-third of the weekend's matches, and in which the Bochums and Frankfurts of the league have replaced Bayern and Wolfsburg?

I, for one, am going find a new way of wasting my time.

Jefferson Chase is a Deutsche Welle sports correspondent.

Editor: Nancy Isenson