Clocks in Western Europe and Britain were moved ahead by an hour over the weekend — about three weeks behind the U.S. clock-tweaking.

They have moved to Euro daylight savings time, and England is now three hours behind Abu Dhabi, sted the four hours during the winter, and the continent is two hours behind, sted three.

The good news?

We now can again get the Uefa Champions League into the newspaper. Despite the 10:45 p.m. kickoffs.

The bad news?

It means getting the latest possible deadline here — 1.15 a.m. — and a crew of five working fairly deep into the next day.

Why would we at The National go to such lengths for the Champions League?

Because even though we are in Asia, the UAE is very west-oriented, when it comes to its sports appetites and interests. And nothing in Europe (or the left side of Asia) is as big as the Champions League.

Thus, the quarter-final first leg of Chelsea at Paris St.-Germain and Dortmund at Real Madrid were the biggest events of the news cycle tonight.

Just as, the night before, Atletico Madrid at Barcelona and Bayern Munich at Manchester United were the biggest events out there.

(I estimate that approximately 100 million soccer fans over here spent a significant chunk of their time today arguing/discussing Wayne Rooney’s dive in the ManU-Bayern match.)

Thanks to our handful of regular correspondents in Britain and the continent, we were able to get our own match reports from press row for three of the four encounters, and they were thoughtful, useful stories provided by veteran soccer writers. Like Richard Jolly’s analysis from Paris on Chelsea’s disaster versus PSG, an account any objective observer would much prefer to the minute-by-minute dreck provided by Britain’s Press Association that ESPN, among many others, use.

The Champions League is so big in the UAE, I wonder if employers and principals notice a higher absence rate among worker and students, the morning after those matches end.

It is so big, we will stay till a 1:15 a.m. deadline to get it in the paper and to post to the web our correspondents’ stuff before leaving.

It does, however, make for some really long days. And the risk of extra time, in the second legs, means it is possible that not even the 1:15 a.m. deadline will yield results.

(Matches end about 12:35 a.m.; our guys file by 12:45, giving us 30 minutes to read the story, choose at least three photos, including one on the cover, and get headlines and captions … and to add 30 minutes of extra time to the matches is pretty much a killer.)

The second legs are next Tuesday and Wednesday, and that is when the risk of extra time — or even a shootout — is acute. (Though PSG winning by two and Real by three, reduces the chances of an extra 30 minutes of soccer.)

But it such a big story here … we have to hope for the best and stay the extra two hours or so.

And I can assure you, from driving home extra late … Abu Dhabi is very, very quiet at 1:30 a.m.