The UAE does not observe daylight savings. No moving around of clocks here. The country is four hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time the year round.

That is not the case in the United States and western Europe, however, and that is handy, for those of us living here. In some ways.

Not so good in others.

The upsides?

When Europe has moved the clocks ahead, a stretch of seven months from March till October, we here in the UAE do not wait as long to watch live sports events … and we may be able to get many of the most significant into The National.

If we are interested enough, we can almost always get a midnight deadline, at the newspaper, and that allows us to jam in any European event ending by, say, 9:30 p.m. in Paris … or any event in Britain ending by 8:30 p.m.

Because for most of the year, most of Europe is only two hours behind us, here in Abu Dhabi, and London is three hours. Thanks to their moving up of their clocks.

Thus, for the first half of the Uefa Champions League group stage, even with games starting at 10:45 p.m. in the UAE, if we arranged a 1 a.m. deadline, and we did, we were able to get all the results into the print product.

This matters because the Champions League probably is the most closely followed sports event in this country, certainly among Emiratis and western expats. In this part of the world, attention is paid to the most significant clubs (you would need a very long time to find an Emirati fan of, say, Fulham) … and the Champions League has all the significant clubs involved in it.

However, when Europe rolls back the clocks to “standard” local time — which happens a week earlier in Europe than it does in the U.S. — we have no chance of getting Champions League results into the newspaper.

Games start at 11:45 p.m.; not even at 1 a.m. deadline is late enough.

We also have the issue of whether we can remain awake late enough to watch the matches. Often, this is a problem for me.

Tonight, however, I was in the office until midnight, and when I got to the apartment Arsenal’s game at Dortmund was in the early stages, and I sat and watched the whole of it, and Arsenal beat a good team again, which hasn’t happened all that much since 2006.

The other upside to the end of daylight savings is how very tidy it makes my communications with the Pacific coast of the U.S. — where anyone in Pacific Standard Time is exactly 12 hours behind me.

You might be surprised at how often we have to sit and ponder to remember how it is, the rest of the year — “California is 11 hours behind, not 13. You subtract, don’t add …”

But from November 4 until March 9, I can look at my watch and know what time it is back home. No reflection needed.

(DST is fairly random the world over, as this site makes clear. Even in the U.S., it can be weird. Arizona doesn’t observe it, for example.)

Though it does strike me that Champions League matches, watched in California, would come on the air at 11:45 a.m. …

Which might make for some furtive viewing in offices up and down the west coast, or perhaps a particularly strong lunchtime rush at many sports bars.