Iceland, when you think about it, is a very odd country. It’s a country which, by all counts, should not really be one. It clings to the very edge of Europe – but only just. It’s physically closer to the near-barren Greenland than to Norway. And when you look at its terrain, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth immediately makes sense.
It’s a land so volcanically and geologically active that it looks like a work in progress: like a huge Neanderthal kitchen. It is full of active volcanoes, of hinterland, of mountains, crevasses, glaciers, geysers, gigantic waterfalls, glacial rivers, and most mystifying of all, lava fields.
That’s just the coastline, because great chunks of its 103,001 square kilometres are empty. The Icelandic interior is so awkward and so uninhabitable that no one can think of anything useful to do there.
No one knows much about Iceland really, except for Reykjavik, the city were everyone (read: men) comes back and says: “In-nisa, man, tal-ġenn!!”
It’s a place where you cannot go out unless you kit yourself in Gore-tex and 13 layers of thermal long johns.
It’s no wonder that not many people live there: only 325,600. That’s 100,000 less than Malta.
It stands to reason then that they barely have space to build a football stadium, and the ones they have are probably perched on a glacier, between a mountain and a volcano.
Fine, there are no traffic problems, so players arrive on time and serene for their training and not wanting to sit down and gnaw the ball with road rage.
But their premier league games probably get cancelled all the time because of volcanic ash of one Eyjafjallajökull or other.
Team training is probably limited to trying to find the ball among the ashes out on the lava fields.
And it being a place where you grow icicles on your eyebrows the minute you step out, the pool of men wanting to be football players must be very limited.
It has nothing to do with training or facilities or talent. It’s all in the mind
And yet. They are a football success story. They rank 34th best team in the world at the moment. Just to put things in perspective, Malta ranks 155th and there are 209 teams.
For the Euro 2004 qualification, Iceland had four wins and topped the group table for a long while. They even held Germany to a nil-nil draw in Reykjavík.
In the qualifying for the 2014 Fifa World Cup, Iceland reached the play-offs for the tournament. And in 2004, Icelandic football achieved its first win over a major nation, with a 2-0 victory over Italy in a friendly.
What about Malta, with our lovely idyllic weather, our freshly turfed football grounds, and our 100,000 extra manpower to choose players from?
We are considered “one of the weaker sides in Europe” according to Wikipedia.
“Malta has never made it to the finals of any major international competition,” although, if it’s of any consolation, we “have never ranked at the bottom of the Fifa world rankings”.
So all this begs the question: what’s the problem with the Maltese national football team? Let us remember that along the years we were beaten not once, but twice by Faroe Islands – neighbours of Iceland; population 50,000 people. Last June we were beaten by newcomers Gibraltar, with a population the size of Birkirkara’s.
Clearly the problem is not the pool of talent. If Gibraltar, Faroe Islands and Iceland can find talent in a pond, then we should all be raining mini-Beckhams and Pirlos.
I watched the two recent euro qualifier games at Ta’ Qali. The one against Norway was as depressing as the Icelandic landscape. If Maltese players left the pitch en masse, no one would have noticed.
Then last Monday for the game against Italy, our men became ironmen, warriors, Mel Gibson’s William Wallaces. They fought tooth and nail for the ball even when one man down.
The referee, clearly in awe of the star-studded Italian team, picked on Malta and started dishing out red and yellow cards like his livelihood depended on it. I wouldn’t be too sure if I were him: the Uefa official sitting right behind me was busy scribbling notes each time the ref put his hands in his shirt pocket.
How do we explain a series of abysmal, hopeless performances against mediocre or average teams, and then a braveheart performance against a team of multi-millionaire players?
Why is it that at times we show incredible resilience, and in most others we are defeated in spirit by the first whistle?
It is clear at this point, that it has nothing to do with training or facilities or talent. It’s all in the mind.
We still haven’t shaken off the għadu factor. We can’t be bothered with the odd furban here and there, but give us the whole fleet of the Turkish empire and we’ll beat them to a pulp.
What the Malta Football Association needs to do is invest in shrinks. Sit our players on the therapist’s couch and get them to believe that each game is a do or die. That, and take them to train barefoot on Comino – as we know from Iceland, geological hardships give good results.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti