The Maltese Derby

Day -587. WorldCup2018

There's one more week of domestic league football before the break for more World Cup qualifiers. And over this weekend will Jose Mourinho make it a hat trick of FA charges against him? Will Paul Pogba remember he came to Manchester to play football? Will the most expensively assembled team in the Championship, Aston Villa, finally start giving their new owner some reward for all his money spent? Will Malta get through a weekend of football without an allegation of match fixing?

Malta host Slovenia next week before playing a friendly against Iceland. The Maltese FA must be sick of being asked why Iceland, with a smaller population than Malta's, has achieved things in football that the Maltese could only dream of. What I think the reality is is that the MFA are pretty annoyed with their Icelandic counterparts. "We were all happy being pretty useless minnows, always bottom of our group, and occasionally winning by losing by one goal against Italy or England. Why did you have to go and invest in indoor pitches and qualified coaches? Now everybody in Malta wants us to do the same. But it will never happen because our players want to stay at home with their mummy and daddy and walk through the village everyday and be treated like superstars. Damn you Iceland for making all us small countries have to pretend we have a long term plan. We used to just plan who was going to sit where in the VIP seats every weekend. That was the extent of our planning. And we built that fancy new pitch. We thought that would keep everybody quiet for a while. Maybe when you come here you can take it easy, maybe a draw? Otherwise, we'll never hear the end of it, how embarrassing that Iceland are so much better than us."

The big match in Malta this weekend is Valletta v Hamrun Spartans. It used to be the Liverpool-Manchester United of Maltese football, the River Plate-Boca Juniors, the Fenerbache-Galatasary. Intense and sometimes ugly. Many years ago my favourite weekend thing to do was to walk the half hour distance from my house to The Stadium in Malta. These were the days of no football on TV and big crowds at the stadium. One of those Saturday afternoon walks, let's say in 1983, was to watch Valletta play Hamrun. My initial excitement at going to watch this took on a tinge of nervous excitement as I neared the stadium and saw the big, loud swearing men. No problem, I thought. All part of the fun. Into the mass of men moving as a whole towards the turnstiles I tentatively waded. As the noise from the men encircling me got louder and what I took to understand as anger got meaner, I made the never before made decision (and never again) to turn around and head out of the crowd and away from the entrance. The sight of the young, blonde, fair skinned boy wiggling, the wrong way, through a crowd of the finest examples of angry, drunk Mediterranean men was probably quite the source of bemusement and amusement for those men.

Many years later I was in a very similar situation, if not in a much bigger crush of Birmingham's finest, a few steps away from a Villa Park entrance and it never crossed my mind to turn around. Yes, I was older but was I wiser? I bought a ticket off a group of young locals in the middle of that crush. I could have been turned away at the turnstile for having a fake ticket.

Hamrun have hit some hard times in recent years. They've been in a Leeds United-type re-building phase in the lower divisions for a number of seasons. So this is the big return to the big time, as big as it gets in Malta. And the MFA are happy to have the two big rivals playing each other again. The crowds will be back, the Hamrun fans will pack the stadium to see their boys finally get one over Valletta. That is, of course, if Liverpool or Manchester United or Juventus aren't playing on TV at the same time