Did you see that letter in The Times recently that cast doubt and aspersions on the validity of that noble activity Subbuteo (table soccer) as a sport. Of course it’s a sport, and I’ll flick sand in the eyes of anyone who disagrees with me.

Apparently, the annual Malta Sports Awards reserved a category for expert exponents of this great sporting art form – and why not? Why shouldn’t athletes with extremely supple index fingers be honoured for their expertise and dexterity?

That is a rhetorical question… in fact, it shouldn’t be a question at all; for there is no doubt that Subbuteo – along with a host of other so-called minority sports is just as deserving of an accolade or three.

I – for one – know of at least three dedicated Subbuteo athletes who have trained for… ooh – minutes, in order to perfect their technique. Indeed, in the official table soccer website the following statement appears: “In Malta it almost became the de facto national sport!” So there!

Have these uninformed detractors any idea what a top-of-his-game Subbuteo player has to go through in order to succeed at his given discipline? My cousin Wiġi is rightly regarded as one of the world’s finest table soccer exponents.

But it didn’t just happen; he is permanently in a 24/7 rigorous training regime. Index finger flexing, thumb squats… you name it. No alcohol between the hours of midnight and 10 a.m. Six weeks annually at Subbuteo training camp.

The poor boy is a martyr to his sport which, in my humble opinion, should not only feature prominently in the Malta annual sports awards, but should regularly be recognised with a Sportsman of the Year award. In fact, the – totally deserved – inclusion of this skill in the awards ceremony has forced me to consider the a whole stack of other mini or table ‘sports’ and their standing in our national sporting panoply:

For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that at the recent MIASMA (Malta International Athletic and Sporting Minority Awards) ceremony, no fewer than a further 14 – yes 14 sporting skills were awarded with national recognition. Obviously, the most well-known of these is the noble and healthy outdoor sport of songbird slaughtering.

A solid silver cup, standing no less than eight centimetres tall, is awarded annually for the heaviest bag of the short (12-month) season. The 2011 award went to a certain Manwel Cacchia Sant, whose bag of 187 song thrushes, 147 yellow bunting, 123 greenfinches, 12 golden orioles and a nightingale, set a new world record for a single sortie, and will – we are assured – be appearing in the next edition of the Guinness Book of Records. Mr Cacchia Sant must indeed be a very proud Neanderthal.

We may be totally useless when it comes to football, tennis, ski jumping and figure skating, but it is in the scaled-down versions of otherwise normal – sorry, sorry… I mean, accepted (by some) as normal sports that we really excel.

We Maltese have long been renowned for our expertise at such complex mini-disciplines as… pocket billiards, table squash, Aussie rules Canasta and gridiron draughts.

But how many realise we have also won medals at such diverse sporting activities as projectile vomiting, major league nose-picking, all-in crocheting, bare knuckle boċċi, bath yachting – (The current world record holder in the bath dinghy class is a Maltese migrant to Australia) – under-the-duvet basketball, fireside kung fu, hamster baiting and… in the senior citizens category: synchronised dribbling and creative incontinence.

At the aforementioned Sporting Minority Awards ceremony our great diversity of sporting achievements was celebrated and applauded by all present. In his speech Chevalier Trixie Debono Spiteri (Well, he started life as a bloke) told the assembled sporting personalities: “Prosit.” And so say all of us.

The only rather poignant moment in what was generally hailed as an enormously successful awards evening, came when the late Ryan Azzopardi Loporto’s unique achievement as Malta’s greatest ever exponent of wheelchair waterpolo was recognised and commemorated.

And this year we even introduced a brand new sporting diversion with strip contract bridge. However – even more significant was the breakthrough sporting activity of synchronised flatulence, won by the team from the Maria Goretti Institute in Paola; so congratulations big time to them.