Local sportsmen Miguel Ciantar and Matthew Asciak have not only inherited their fathers’ sporting genes, but also the support and experience that come from people who know what it is to take sports seriously. David Schembri spoke to them and their seniors to learn what filling dad’s boots – after he has hung them.

Matthew and Gordon Asciak.

Father-son relationships are rarely easy. They are so important that the stakes run extremely high; so basic that getting it wrong – and in ‘it’ we also include upbringing – may make or break the son’s life.

Having discovered that his son, Matthew, had the makings of a good athlete at age three, Gordon coached him to beat his own record of being the youngest player to win the Malta Open at 15 years old

The relationship is even tougher when one has to add ‘coach’ to the father’s job description, as tennis veteran Gordon Asciak, 51, knows all too well. Having discovered that his second son, Matthew (now 23), had the makings of a good athlete at age three, Gordon coached him to beat his own record of being the youngest player to win the Malta Open at 15 years old.

“It’s very difficult to coach your own son; they seem to take other people’s advice more seriously. That’s what happens when parents try to teach their children something,” Gordon says, a tone of resigned acceptance in his voice.

He recalls that when he used to take his son to Palermo, where a friend of his used to coach, Matthew used to train hard for two hours straight without taking a water break, whereas back home, he would stay in his comfort zone.

“Again, this was because on the other side he had his father, not another coach.”

Matthew always knew he had “big boots to fill”, but he says that although both his parents were great tennis players in their own right, they “never put too much pressure as some parents do”.

We are speaking at the Marsa Sports Club, where Gordon, with his wife Helen, runs the Gordon Asciak Tennis Academy. It is a rather quiet Saturday morning, and Matthew, who also coaches at the academy, is in Luxembourg representing Malta in the Games of the Small States of Europe, where he has just won a silver medal in the mixed doubles. This clearly frustrates his father, who feels that if Matthew invested more in his playing career and international competitions, sche would have smoked away the opposition.

Mabbli and Miguel Ciantar. Photos: David Schembri

Mabbli Ciantar seems to be more laidback about his own son, Miguel, who is on his first professional contract with BOV Premier League side Sliema Wanderers.

Mabbli, 55, who was a left-winger for Żebbug Rangers and Sliema till the 1980s, noticed that his son had a natural talent for football at a very young age. Kicking a ball about in their Qawra home, Mabbli used to “be Inter” while his two sons, Matthew (now also a coach) and Miguel, pretended they were Milan and Juventus. The kids stuck with their allegiances – a benevolent gesture by a father who ensured that in his family, at least one of the men was happy about who won the Serie A every year. “I knew what I was doing,” the Interista jokes.

The domestic kickabouts showed Miguel’s raw talent for the game, which was eventually noticed when Leli Fabri, a former teammate of Ciantar’s, saw Miguel playing at the Bognor Beach Club in Bugibba and got him to join the Sliema Wanderers’ nursery.

From then on, Miguel, now 22, did not need much coaxing to train. “I always had a ball with me,” he says, and now sport is his full-time occupation, with his pro career as a footballer and his PE teaching career both about to take off.

Although Ciantar Sr put a ball into the way of his son’s feet, he did not coach him. But this did not stop him from offering tips after watching him play. “I always ask my dad first about my performance,” Miguel says. His father, on the other hand, doesn’t find “much to criticise – he knows what he has to do at this stage”.

“When I was younger, he always taught me something new; now I know where I’ve gone wrong and what I’ve done well,” Miguel says.

The difference between the generations is apparent in the amount of opportunities the sons got, compared to their parents. Mabbli’s equivalent of a football nursery was football matches using garage doors as goal posts –“every time we scored we’d get told off by the neighbours” – which eventually developed when a local man organised the street footballers into a team.

While he hung up his boots aged 25 to focus on building his home, his son, whose football earnings will at least match what he gets as a PE teacher, would be better off if he kept on playing as long as he could.

Gordon believes the opportunities to participate at an international stage are much wider now than they were in his time, but he does appreciate his son’s aversion to the hardships of pro tennis.

Matthew recalls how the toughest moment of his career was when he had a bad run of tournaments in 2011. “I had a patch of about seven to eight tournaments where I always had very tough draws and lost a number of matches in the first round against top seed players.

“The difficult thing to handle was that I was playing great tennis at the time and was very close to winning each match. For me, that was very difficult to stomach and every time I lost it was a big blow to my confidence. Eventually, this made me decide to stop travelling so much,” Matthew says, fresh from his GSSE win.

In a similar vein, Miguel was close to being signed by big clubs in Italy and England, but these opportunities – which he would still be keen to take – fell apart, and were also blows to his morale. In fact, Mabbli notes that he is more of a help to his son in these times of trial than on the pitch.

As for himself, Mabbli doesn’t play regularly anymore; he just kicks a ball about in an occasional five-a-side match. Gordon, on the other hand, has just shed 12 kilos as he prepares to return to compete in the over-50s in Italy. “I’ve still got it,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye.

More fodder for the rivalry with his son, then, who believes his father’s similar characters made them clash: “We always used to fight when he used to coach me and a lot of our sessions used to end up with one of us storming off the court and not talking to the other. This went on until recently when I grew up a bit and realised that all he wanted to do was help me improve and not make the same mistakes he had made. We get on much better now, although we are still very competitive and always want to win against one another so that we can have the ‘bragging rights’ at the dinner table.

“I would like to thank both my parents for all they have done for me . . . without them I would be nothing,” Matthew says.