Football shame

I am mortified! No worse, I am disgusted, distraught, disembowelled! Oh the shame of it, the embarrassingly head-hangingly, humiliating shame of it! Truly the one area in which I thought we Maltese could compete on a par with the rest of Europe... nay, the world and yet... even here we allow ourselves to be brow-beaten into international submission and scandalously humbling mediocrity.

When those Croatian football hooligans went berserk the other week, I thought that the least that could happen would be that our equivalent would turn and fight... indeed win the battle of Ta' Qali. But instead what happened? Just as the battle was hotting up, our brave lads, our valiant villains, our young yobs... instead of manning the Valletta side with stoic bravery, armed to the teeth and taunting our adversaries with casually flung obscenities... they, we, were evicted "quietly"... yes quietly from the stadium via a side exit.

What could be more shaming and disgraceful than to allow a load of bloody foreigners free rein inside our national football gladiatorial arena to run amok completely unchallenged by our own... home-grown football hooligans.

Sadly, I and the rest of the lads from the Benghajsa Ultras were unable to be present on that one occasion when we were most needed for a variety of reasons.

I was kept from the fray by my wife, who wanted my help to stock up at the supermarket. Crazy Alex (he's our axe-wielding nutter, who will go to any lengths to enjoy an armed confrontation), was prevented from attending by his Mum (well, she is a very big lady).

Neither could Mad-Dog Karmnu turn up, since he was having a fitting for his new alter-boy outfit... and Loony Eric, who once brought a Premier League game to a premature end by single-handedly taking on the entire Valletta side armed only with a length of chain and a pair of loaded underpants, couldn't be there 'cos he had run out of Oil of Ulay and was stocking up at the pharmacy.

And bone-headed Bertu, who as a general rule would normally do absolutely anything to get himself admitted to the ITU, couldn't make it 'cos he had a needle-point class.

So the Croats had free rein. But I tell you this much... if we had been there, we wouldn't just have chucked namby-pamby seats at them, we'd have smashed up the stands and terraces and thrown pieces of them!

Don't forget the Benghajsa Ultras have a long and proud history of crowd violence and unprovoked hooliganism... going right back to the battle of the Schreiber in 1964. Then who could forget our cavalry charge on loaded Vespas through the massed hordes of Floriana supporters during the siege of the Gzira Stadium in 1975... Not to mention the, still talked about in hushed and admiring whispers, massacre at Luxol in 1989.

Instead we had to sit back and watch a gang of Balkan amateurs... who, let's face it, couldn't organise a riot in West Ham pub at closing time... take centre stage in an operation with all the threat and menace of a Buddhists prayer meeting!

Will we ever live it down? Don't answer that... it's too painful to even contemplate. I mean what's the point of getting your head shaved and your body covered in tattoos if the bloody cops won't allow you to use them in a provocative manner while questioning the parentage of your adversaries? What were the police doing there anyway? It was a private punch-up, they weren't even invited.

As I said to my mate Psycho Salv: "It's a sad day for Malta when your own people are employed to prevent us from carrying out our illegal right to maim and dismember a poxy group of poofy bloody foreigners from the sissified north. What is this country coming to? Come home, Norman Lowell... all is forgiven.