Mafia rules

Let’s take a deserved break from boring politics and move on to more serious stuff like football. Don’t worry I won’t go into too much detail as unlike most of Malta I am no pundit. I just love watching a game every so often and am completely unbiased in the way I view and appraise matches.

I am unbiased enough to say that anything Italian—at least in football—is good and the rest is junk. It would be interesting to hear whether the political turncoats we have been viewing with such passion stick to one team or if they go from team to team or if on days of great decisions they choose to abstain. Oops that was a stain on my character—I promise no politics and they still inch their way into my thought processor. I feel I’m like someone preparing a cake and while using the processor a cabbage or an onion hurls itself into the churning sweetness. Vegetables, it seems, can also have a life of their own.

Back to footer and the men who do the fancy footwork. Talking of footwork—if we are never going to achieve much at the Eurovision song fest why not get hold of Kurt Calleja and ask him to form a football team? I’m sure you remember his deft touches with his feet—surely he will manage to dribble a few defenders with his mesmerising stuff? Get on with it maybe we will lose another song festival but we will outclass all other footballers and win something at glorious last.

To the Euro now. No not the one the Greeks are amassing in some hidden horse trove so that after their zillionth bailout they can bring out said mythological horse and take over the rest of the, by then, bankrupt world.  They will then take Berlin by storm and use Frau Merkel in all sorts of unseemly ways. Let’s get back to the footballing Euro.

Tomorrow (Thursday) Italy face the might of Merkel’s panzers who are in scintillating form and could, in theory, swipe Monti’s football representatives off the face of the turf in Warsaw.

According to a knowledgeable pundit at the stationer’s Italy could spring a surprise and win. He said, after all they have the Mafia. I know this was a comment by one man in one little shop in some wayward place in Msida. But this is going way beyond our flag-waving, klaxon-blaring histrionics.

The guy who said this was hardly—or seemed hardly—an idiot. But obviously in our pigeon-holing way we think that the Mafia is bad and all-pervasive so they also help nations win football games.

Of course by that reasoning Greece never stood much of a chance when facing cash-rich bailer-in-chief Germany. Is it just pure idiocy to say such things or a horrible reflection of how we survive, not just on bread alone, but on stereotyping—and damning—away everything and anything that moves and that is not like us or that is not like what we think is the norm? Our ideas sometimes spring from an unbelievable unconcern for anything connected to reality.

Life is never boring on this our Isle of Mad. May the Mafia wreak havoc on the pitch and help provide a safe journey to the final for the Italian crooks.