Excellence and disservice

Maltese teams’ recent participation in European club football competitions had two different aspects: the excellent shows by Birkirkara, Valletta and Sliema and the extremely poor service provided by the local TV sports stations regarding these games.

Birkirkara beat Andorra’s Santa Coloma 4-3 with a brilliant first-half performance that could have provided two or three more goals for the Stripes. In the second half, they controlled the game to move on easily.

Then came the second-round game against the champions of Slovakia, which finished in the last 16 of the 2010 World Cup and knocked out world champions Italy. Their champions, Zilina, were beaten by Il mago Paul Zammit’s side, who produced a first-class performance. All the players were great. They lost 0-3 in the return with two goals in the last 12 minutes. Since then, Zilina knocked out Bulgarian champions Liteks Lovethi and beat Sparta Prague 2-0 in Prague and are on the verge of making it to the group stages. This perhaps puts more gloss on Birkirkara’s display.

Valletta met Poland’s Ruch Chorzow, the Poles who are about 50 places above in the rankings, but only a penalty and a missed chance in the first leg denied City a passage to the next round. In Chorzow, Andrew Hogg was brilliant, but so too was the Chorzow goalkeeper who denied Valletta two certain goals in the last minute of extra time. It is said that fortune favours the brave but City were out without losing a game.

Sliema performed brilliantly in Croatia with their Hungarian goalkeeper in super form but Sliema had their chances. In the return leg, it was all over when Stbnek scored their first goal in the second half.

All the three Maltese teams were well prepared and they chose some very good foreign players.

Now to the TV coverage of these games by the local stations.

It was horrendous when Birkirkara beat Zilina 1-0 (a great result for local soccer) and TVM and Net only showed a two-to-three-minute video of the game, as they did in all the games by the Maltese. Yet, in the same sports bulletins we had to endure repeated World Cup news, foreign hockey, Franck Ribery’s troubles etc.

One station showed the film of Birkirkara’s 4-3 win over Santa Coloma, where most of the time the commentator kept criticising the Birkirkara goalkeeper who proved his worth in the games against Zilina. But, at least, they showed a little respect to local football fans and screened one game.

The icing on the cake (!) came from Melita Cable or Melita Sports, which usually transmit two or three live games by the Maltese teams but maybe they decided to go on holiday and deal another blow to their faithful subscribers.

This attitude by the Maltese stations is not helping local football. Most of the know-all reporters of all stations decided to bore us to death with repeat World Cup programmes, in the process snubbing the locals’ fine show in Europe.