When England won...

The last mental picture I have of my father was of him in the little round balcony in the late evening of July 30, 1966. Ghar id-Dud, where we lived, was awash with cars honking and people rushing around like lunatics. My father was ecstatically waving a huge Union Jack. England had just won the World Cup. Sadly, because he forgot to take his pills, he was dead by one o'clock the next day. At least he died happy.

Such is a typical case of World Cup fever turning the world upside down. In the next few weeks we can forget about racism, fascism, environmental pollution, cancer and all the other blights and warts that mar the beauty of the world and focus exclusively on Totti, Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo, plus the trillion dollar question; who is going to win the 2006 World Cup?

Nothing in the world's calendar of sporting events can match the attraction of almost all the world's countries represented by 11 paladins racing after a ball. While, as usual, we in Malta have long been eliminated as a nation, our time-honoured adherence to the pro-English or pro-Italian camps ensures that this major sporting event will not pass by without affecting our emotions which are, to my eternal bewilderment, deep-rooted and, in many cases, hysterical. Despite my father's pro-English stance which is shared by most of my family on both sides, I remain relatively cool about it all and while harbouring a little wish that after four decades England will win again, take the attitude of "let the best team win".

Unlike my father I was (and still am) physically unsuited for athletic life. Where he was tall, athletic and willowy, I am average and stocky. Bespectacled from an early age I had always preferred the tranquillity of the college library to the rigours of the football pitch. College in my day meant that if you were not in the first 11 or aspired to be, you were practically subhuman.

If any of my contemporaries, some of whom were the great football heroes of the 1965-1972 vintage, are reading this they will understand why. Despite my apparent indifference to the game, the World Cup has always stirred up some dormant gene in me which every four years I never cease to be surprised by.

I will never forget the spectacular boat-cade on the Grand Canal in 1982 when Italy beat Poland or Portugal; I forget which, or the all-night street party a week later in Rome when Italy won the World Cup. Most of the time I was imagining what the pro-Italian camp was doing in front of the Preluna, just around the corner from where I lived, and actually feeling homesick!

My mother and I had arrived in Rome from Florence by train at about seven in the evening on the day of the final. Stazione Termini was deserted apart form a few bewildered foreigners like ourselves. The game was due to start in about half an hour and Rome was empty. Not a bus or a taxi or a car in Via Nazionale or Piazza Venezia; not a human being stirred. The quiet was utterly unnerving. It was as if some bomb that killed all human life but left the buildings unscathed, had fallen on the Eternal City, which for the first time in its 3,000-year history, was eerily silent and devoid of traffic.

My mother and I walked all the way to our hotel across the Tiber, pulling our luggage across the cobbles in the middle of the road! We were staying with the nuns in Via Garibaldi and once there and revived by a quick snack we were regaled with the singular sight of a dozen elderly nuns glued to the TV in a state of euphoria. The convent, a mediaeval Farnese Palace, is almost as high as the Giannicolo Gardens and the view from the convent's roof is utterly spectacular and encompasses practically all Rome. Watching the celebratory fireworks and son et lumiere from that vantage point is a scene I will remember for the rest of my life.

In a world that is fraught by human degradation, war, famine, poverty, sickness and death, it is good to have such a great distraction every four years wherein for a few weeks we can put our woes on the back burner and discuss the miraculous goal by Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney's metatarsal injury instead of how large the daily death toll in Iraq was or how many irregular immigrants were towed into Malta by the AFM.

The World Cup is like a palliative that punctuates an ongoing tragedy every four years. Long may it last!

kzt@onvol.net