This is a topic not one person in 100 understands, including most journalists who work inside the office. The logistics of writing sports — how you get to the venue and how you file on deadline.

It’s logistics. Lots of it. And these logistics dominate your thoughts and darken your dreams and engage your adrenal glands and push your blood pressure north and maybe shorten your life, but what the hell, were you going to live forever?

Case in point? My over-and-back trip to Doha, capital of Qatar, for the Asian Cup match I mentioned the other night. It was a semi-classic exercise in the execution of logistics, one I indulged in often when I was young … one that may not be all that common anymore now that so many newspapers hardly travel. One of those, “well you could do it that way, but you probably shouldn’t try it” things.

Let me describe it to you.

The short version? Taxi, plane, bus, taxi, bus, game, bus, bus, taxi, bus, plane, taxi.

That’s 11 bits of transportation forming a really thick wad of bread around the thin slice of meat (aka the game) that turned into the column that people saw on the website or read in the newspaper. But that is what it took to get from my home in Abu Dhabi to Doha and back to Abu Dhabi without spending the night in a hotel. Sixteen hours of movement, most of it scripted, planned, some of it ad hoc, a lot of it nerve-racking. But no hotel!

Taxi at 12:30 p.m. Benjamin, our Filipino taxi driver, taking me to the Ahu Dhabi airport. Check in, do a New York Times Sunday crossword, read “Sport 360” the probably doomed sports-only newspaper printed in Dubai (great use of photos; nice graphics; crummy content; overworked staff), and get on a half-empty Qatar Airlines flight for a 3 p.m. takeoff.

Land at Doha at 3 p.m. — a one-hour flight but a gain of one hour for a time-zone change. I then rediscover that Doha’s airport is one of the ultimate horrors in international air travel — an airport without a single jetway. Every plane, all of them, including those of the national carrier, parks out on the tarmac, and everyone on said plane then shuffles off the aircraft and into a bus, which drives you around the airport for 5-15 minutes before parking you at passport control.

The line there is about 300 Third Worlders deep. And moving at about two people per minute. Kickoff is at 7:15, and I could miss it, at this rate and pick up tuberculosis in the bargain. I get lucky when the two immigration agents dedicated to moving “GCC nationals” (Gulf citizens, basically) through passport control have no customers, and a guy in a uniform pulls open one of those elastic bands that create the appalling back-and-forth lines of people … and I follow three thirtysomething Yanks with shaved heads who are either 1) American military traveling back to base or 2) former American military going to their new Blackwater gigs, over to the new line, which spits me into Qatar proper about 20 minutes sooner than I expected — once I had paid the 100 Qatari rials (about $27, via credit card) for a visa … just cuz they shake people down at the airport there. Grand.

Now, for some local dinero and a cab. I misjudge the ATM situation in baggage-claim, walking past two perfectly good ATMs (but not from my bank, which might save me 32 cents, or something; penny-wise, etc.) and out to the arrivals hall, which has zero ATMs but about 50 tiny booths arranging hotels rooms and renting cars. I hoist my backpack (heavy with my 2006 model Dell laptop) over my shoulder and head out — where about 100 guys are waiting to do things for me for a really great price. Drive me around, mostly. Ever landed at Puerto Vallarta or Mexico City and walked out of baggage claim into a motley crowd? Yeah, those guys. “Taxi? Taxi, sir? Guided tour?”

I just kept walking, head down, like I knew where I was going. Looking out the plane’s window on approach I had seen a long line of taxis waiting to get to customers, and they had to be there somewhere. But first I went to the departures entrance for another look for an ATM, and I found one and withdrew 300 Qatari rials. That should do for one day.

Back outside, ready to pay for a real cab. I march through the yammering would-be black-market/off-the-books helpers/scammers, consider crossing the street into what appears to be the unattractive edge of downtown Doha, and around the corner I notice four cabs lined up at the curb. Actual cabs, around the corner from where they ought to be. No signs. Whatever. I walk the 50 yards, get in one, and say, “Khalifa Stadium.” The guy acts dumb. Actually tells me the town has two Khalifa stadiums. I say, “the one by the Aspire building”, which my colleague already in Doha had recommended that I announce, and at least it gets the cabbie moving. It’s about 4 p.m.

We drive through Doha, which is one ugly town. Qatar was not awarded the 2022 World Cup for its good looks. I mean, feel free to mix in a tree. Lay down some sidewalks. Build a four-lane road. Try a gridded city layout. We crawl through heavy traffic on a late Saturday afternoon. Not even a week day. Crazy. Every 100 yards, we come to a clotted roundabout. Did any of those Fifa voters actually visit this place? After various adventures with my driver, including some doubling back because he has no idea where the “Women’s Club” — which is housing the Main Media Center (MMC) — is, I finally put together the presence of coach-type buses with a mag-and-bag tent and realize, “hey, we just drove past the MMC.” The cabbie turns around, not following the directions somebody had given him, and I’m out. It’s pushing 5 now, and I’m starting to get agitated because about 80 percent of “what could go wrong” is still ahead of me.

I go into the subsidiary credentialing tent, next to the mag-and-bag place, and I’ve got my credential in 10 minutes. A big time-savings. Credential trouble can kill a road trip right off, if it isn’t where it’s supposed to be — and to increase my odds I’ve carried with me a printout of the “your application has been accepted” e-mail the Asian Football Confederation had sent me two weeks before. I get the credential (another horrible mugshot; amazing), go through the mag-and-bag and enter the MMC proper.

No one there. Never a good sign. A couple of guys behind counters in the lobby, but no one who looks like a working journalist. Maybe they’re all at the early game (Iran vs. North Korea, in progress), or they already have left for the late game, my game. I cut short my “look around the MMC plan” and go directly to the “transport” desk, where a friendly but confused older guy sits behind piles of bus schedules. I find the one that details “MMC to Al Rayyan Stadium” and realize a bus is supposed to leave in six minutes, at 4:25. I want on that bus. (When in doubt, go to the stadium now.)

I make the bus, as do about eight of my best Iraqi sports writer friends, who josh it up all the way to the stadium, another nightmarish crawl over awful streets and out into the desert, where the wind is coming up and something not far from a sandstorm is brewing.

So, the stadium. Here we are. Nothing much. Imagine the Home Depot Center, but without the luxury boxes or any of the amenities. That is Al Rayyan Stadium. Just a random 15,000-seater on the outskirts of town, surrounded by the baked sand of the Gulf.

I fire up the laptop, check in with the office and go looking for something to eat. I’ve already consumed my emergency Snickers (always carry one; better, two), but no one is in the stadium yet, nothing is open on the concession front (and concessions are a very exotic concept in the Gulf, anyway; often not available) …

Oh, but before this, I go hunting for a game ticket. At international football matches for about the past 30 years, it’s not enough to have a credential. You also must have a ticket to the specific match you are at to be able to sit in the media section. Plus, you need other tickets/cards/slips of paper to gain access to 1) the media interview room or 2) the mixed zone, where players blow you off while heading to their buses after games.

I have been fretting about this, too. About five minutes into the bus ride from the MMC to the stadium, I have an awful thought:  Was I supposed to get my game ticket at the MMC, and not the specific venue? Well, normally, no. You get it at the venue.  But this is Qatar. Maybe they have their own ideas, and I’ll get to the stadium only to have to go back to the MMC, losing maybe 90 precious minutes … So, I go poking into all the empty rooms branching off from the main workroom under the stadium, find one where someone is distributing tickets, my name is on the list, and I have a ticket for “Game 16” as well as a pass to the press conference room that I know I almost certainly won’t use, but you never turn those down; they’re kinda like pesos — sometimes negotiable. No trip back to the MMC necessary for a ticket. Hurray.

I go up four flights of stairs and try to find a good spot in the press tribune. Another important moment in logistics. You need 1) to be near a power source; 2) to be sure you can get on the internet wherever you are sitting; 3) you must be able to see a TV to get all instant replays and 4) you preferably are within hailing distance of your national colleagues, in case you have a question about what “your” team just did or might do later on. I pick out a spot on the top row, a few seats from four soccer beat writers from the UAE, with semi-decent views of little TVs, and my own power strip and wireless internet. OK. Set.

Next? Find something to eat. This is going to be a problem, because it is impossible to eat during a soccer match, on deadline. Nothing real, like a sandwich. I wander around the stadium. Nothing open. I come back to my seat, and my colleagues are gone. Hmmm. They’re eating something somewhere. I know they are. They wouldn’t all be gone an hour before kickoff. And it turns out that one floor below, the local organizers have put out free food for the scribes and TV guys. Little starchy sandwiches, but that’s exactly what I need. I should be OK for a while.

But now I have to start writing, even though it’s about 6:30, and 45 minutes before kickoff. I have 800 w0rds to file by 9:30, and the match will not end before 9. So I have to have at least 500 words of something vaguely coherent punched into the laptop by 9, and it’s a good idea to write most of them before kickoff, because soccer is one of the worst sports to try to do “running” for — because the action never stops. You have halftime, which is amazingly short, when you’re writing, and that’s it. I go to town with a concept that isn’t completely ridiculous. And I pin down my notes and the starting list because a cool wind, almost a cold wind, is blowing through the press tribune, and papers are flying. Great.

Match begins. This is the fun part. Finally. I’m actually watching. Iraq and the UAE, back and forth. The UAE is quicker and more technical; Iraq is bigger, older, more experienced. Key game, and no one can score. My UAE colleagues and I are trashing a couple of the UAE players who have no business being on the pitch, but they’re the best the coach has got, and how can that be fixed? The same sort of banter that goes on anywhere in the world. “That guy is killin’ us!” Except said with an Indian or Pakistani or SoCal accent.

Then disaster. In the third minute of extra time, 93 minutes into the game, a UAE defender steers a weak Iraq shot into his own goal. I feel bad for the guy, because he had played so well for two hours, but I feel worse for me because I’ve just about finished 800 semi-coherent words predicated on a scoreless result we were 180 seconds away from getting. Now I have a goal at 9:04 p.m., 26 minutes before deadline, and an imminent Iraq victory. I concoct a new lede, run with it for 4-5 grafs, grapple desperately with something that might serve as a segue into the best of what I already had … go with the original concept for about 10 grafs, then flog my brain to come up with a semi-fitting end that reflects the actual result, and not what I hoped would happen. I end up with about half of a new column and half of an old one. Ack. I file late, at 9:40, feeling a bit bad, but the column is not awful and I know from years of being on the other side of the phone that the “deadline” given me by the desk probably has at least 15 minutes of fudge factor built into it. Desk guys lie to reporters in the field about deadline. They do. I’ve done it. Only the really lame reporters don’t know they’re being given fake deadlines.

But I can’t dwell on this because I need to get outta Dodge. My plane leaves at 1 a.m., and I’m about 10 miles into the desert and at the mercy of the media bus system. No cabs run out there. Ha. So I file at 9:40 and I’m packed up, out of the stadium, semi-jogging to the bus parking area by 9:45,  because I do not want that bus I saw from the top level of the stadium to leave without me — because then I’m stuck there another 30 minutes, at least. I want a bus that goes to the media hotels because they are closer to the airport than is the MMC, but a western guy (a Canadian, maybe?) with a volunteer jacket says the buses are running only to the MMC, and I’ll have to change buses there to get to a media hotel.

So, 45 minutes in a bus. Traffic is awful and the game attendance was only 7,000-some. (This is so not going to work in 2022.) Half the vehicles are owned by Iraqis who are honking their horns and letting little kids hang out windows and wave flags. We all crawl towards town. At least I have half a bottle of water.

We reach the MMC. I ask a kid who works for the transport crew if any cabs come by the MMC. I already know the answer is “no” and he confirms it. But the bus over there is heading to the media hotels — and I can perhaps get a cab at the hotels. What I figured would happen, but you can always hope to cut one bus ride out of the equation. So onto another bus, and it leaves 10 minutes late (it’s after 11 now, and if I have to check in two hours early for a 1 a.m. flight …) and I’m now starting to get agitated because if I miss the plane I will be sitting in the airport till about noon the next day because the whole trip is predicated on “and no hotel expense!” Finally the bus crawls into the parking lot of some semi-seedy media hotel and I climb out just as a cab is pulling in. I am halfway in the cab as the people are getting out, and a couple of Japanese photographers try to snatch it away from me — even though I plainly was there before them. Then a little doorman comes out and announces he is very sorry, gentlemen (!) but some hotel guests have requested a cab, and I roll my eyes and wonder when the next one might come by.  A few minutes later, the two guests, an indecisive British couple, come out, decide they don’t want the cab … and I’m back at it like it’s the only life raft in the north Atlantic. One of the Japanese guys is still leaning in the passenger window, talking to the cabbie, but the taxi hasn’t moved. So I walk up to the right-rear passenger door, open it, climb in, announce “airport!” to the Filipino driver and he pulls away even as the Japanese photog is complaining. I think this worked out mostly because the Japanese guy was having trouble communicating with the driver. So, again, “the guy with the better English wins” is borne out.

Over more bad city streets, past more drab and dreary buildings, and they are just gonna have to blow up this town and start over to have the 2022 World Cup here … and by about 11:30 I’m at the airport.

Which is utter chaos, because like many Gulf countries (including the UAE), midnight till about 3 a.m. is the peak period for flying. True story. And the place is wall-to-wall humanity because not even the locals ever envisioned they would have the air traffic they’ve got now. So now I’m glad I’m at the airport, and I have the boarding pass I picked up back in Abu Dhabi, and no luggage, but now I’m worried that my boarding pass issued back at 1 p.m. will be overridden by something issued at midnight in Doha. (It’s not like airlines don’t screw up these things.) So I am keen to be on the plane asap to physically get into 23D so they have to force me out of it, because airlines don’t like to do that. I would like a cookie or an ice cream or a water, but the airport is about 75 percent a nightmarish duty-free shop selling stuff nobody needs, about 24 percent rickety seats and about 1 percent restrooms. So I settle in for an hour of waiting, cheek by jowl with some guys with dry, hacking coughs. They open up my gate, and about 150 people flow into a room meant to hold 50, and we are all waiting for the bus (no jetways, remember? None!) that will take us to the plane. My fifth bus of the day. I wish I hadn’t finished my crossword earlier. The doors open, we crowd into the bus, and it takes off on the longest on-the-tarmac bus ride in aviation history. We drove miles, miles, I tell you, with about 50 people standing up while the driver goes 35 mph, and if he taps the brakes about 50 of us are going to fly out the front window.

Then the best/worst part of the whole manic day … we reach the back door of the airplane, somewhere miles from the terminal, and we can’t get out. We are held on the bus. Packed inside. Stuck. Because the plane was late, and the cleaning crew is still on it.  Why weren’t we just held at the terminal, where at least some of us were sitting? Probably because by putting us on the bus we have “departed” on time … when the plane is going to be a half-hour late. We are semi-Zen, like air travelers are these days, but somebody in this packed bus is going to lose it if this goes on too long. After maybe 20 minutes of this torture, packed in a bus with miles of open tarmac on the other side of the door … they open one door of the bus, we push our way out, shuffle up the stairs to the rear of the plane, fight our way down the aisle, and there is 23D, waiting for me. I feared this plane would be packed and wanted the space of the aisle next to me. And indeed, it does nearly fill up, the crowd pushed up by about 30 UAE soccer fans who are deeply depressed. Nobody else comes for 23D.

Plane takes off, the stews try to hand out juice and little hot-pocket type things to the passengers, but the plane is already headed down before they’ve reached me, and then they come back and try to pick everything up while I’m still gagging down “chicken-like” meat … and we hit the ground gently, and I’m back in Abu Dhabi. I jump about 10 rows as the plane come to a halt (at a jetway, thank you very much), and I’m hurrying to beat the crowd to passport control, where long lines can form. I pass a bunch of dawdlers, and only about 10 people are in front of me. I get my passport stamped, the camera on the wall snaps my photo (I could be dangerous), and I’m into the duty-free area, where I buy two bottles of Penfolds 2008 vintage Shiraz Cabernet and two bottles of Jacob’s Creek sparkling red (because I can, at the airport), hand over my Dh182 (about $50), and go to get a cab. I find one in the middle of the departures level, but a cab minder actually runs over to tell me I can’t get into that empty cab, that I have to go downstairs (new procedure here) to get a cab. On my way a local guy offers to take me to Abu Dhabi for Dh70, and I am so tired and exasperated that I mock him. “Seventy? Seventy? To Abu Dhabi? I live here, and no way is it more than Dh50! Plus, I want a real cab with a real meter!”

So I find one, downstairs, and a quiet guy from, I think, Syria drives me into town. I stumble in the front door at 4:15 a.m., almost 16 hours after I left.

Hey, sports writing isn’t pretty. I needed a day to recover from it all, but I got there, and none of the 25 things that could have destroyed my day happened, and I got back alive. Nobody knows about it or cares; that’s how it is. “Wow, you got to go to the game? I wish I had your job!” Well, maybe you wish you do, but it’s quite a bit trickier than civilians imagine. And I have the taxi-plane-bus-taxi-bus-game-bus-bus-taxi-bus-plane-taxi experience to prove it.