In any society, it is indeed sad when humility, respect and reason are abandoned and snobbery, intolerance and condescending attitudes take over.
In his article Significance Of SportMalta Awards (February 3), Lino Bugeja takes the Malta Sports Council to task, effectively inviting it to start discriminating against this sports and in favour of the other. In doing so, he puts forward arguments which confirm he is absolutely not conversant with what he is talking about.
Wikipedia defines sports as “an organised, competitive, entertaining and skilful activity requiring commitment, strategy and fair play, in which a winner can be defined by objective means. It is governed by a set of rules or customs. Activities such as card games and board games are classified as ‘mind games’ and ‘mind sports’ and some are recognised as Olympic sports, requiring primarily mental skills and mental physical involvement”.
It is within this context that table football – the overall star of the recently-announced SportMalta Awards for 2010 – is to be viewed.
The year 2010 was a unique year of great satisfaction for the sport of table football in Malta. In January 2010, one of the sports’ administrators in Malta, Silvio Catania, was elected president of the Federation of International Sports of Table Football (FISTF). In September the Malta national table football team – made up of Charles Aquilina, Samuel Bartolo, Joseph Borg Bonaci, Derek Conti, Massimo Cremona and Mark Gauci – managed to win the World Cup held in Rain, Germany, beating the more fancied Belgian side in the final. Later in the year, Mr Cremona was an important element in the Italian Serie A side Reggiana, which lifted the European Champions League in Mattersburg, Austria.
As a founding member and former president of the local Table Football Association and as a former board member of the international federation and of the Malta Olympic Committee, as also an athlete myself, I can confirm these results were not achieved out of sheer chance but rather as a consequence of long years of long hours of dedication, training, self-discipline and personal sacrifice on the part of the athletes and officials concerned. These results have also been achieved thanks to innumerable and untiring efforts on the part of the various players and administrators who, throughout the past 30 years since the local association was set up in 1982, played their part in believing that, notwithstanding our small size as a country, working hard, many times in the face of many obstacles, against all odds and without any form of assistance, to achieve the highest goals on a worldwide basis was something which was doable if we could work hard together towards achieving this objective.
I agree with Mr Bugeja that sport presupposes some form of physical exertion: his logical conclusion that table football is not a sport because it lacks this characteristic only goes to confirm Mr Bugeja has actually never seen a competitive game of table football taking place and that his opinion is probably formed by seeing the commercial version of the sport being sold in a toyshop. This is like deciding that table tennis is not a sport because you find ping-pong sets in toyshops. As a former player myself, I can confirm that a proper table-football match is usually a very fast 30-minute encounter, which very often leaves the two players literally sweating.
By his definition, Mr Bugeja would probably also argue that sports such as chess, bridge, billiard sports, bowling, shooting and archery, to name but a few, are not sports. Yet are we to take his advice? Or should we favour the International Olympic Committee’s stance, where such activities are officially recognised as sports?
Mr Bugeja goes on to mention obesity in Maltese children, implying this is the result of practising sports such as table football. However, if one looks at the physical appearance of the six athletes who form the Malta table football team, one can immediately confirm this is not the case. On the other hand, you can have obese children playing football but does that, by extension of Mr Bugeja’s argument, make football not a sport?
Condescending attitudes like Mr Bugeja’s will only serve to divide athletes of the various sporting disciplines in a way which goes diametrically against the De Coubertin spirit. Such arguments will only serve to cast doubts in the mind of the sporting public at a time when we should be looking up to these athletes and officials as people who believed in themselves and who managed to achieve something that is normally beyond the reaches of a small sporting nation such as ours.