Monday’s encounter between Malta and Italy will be the 5th between them and the 3rd on Maltese grounds. Antonio Conte’s reborn national side will face Pietro Ghedin’s side with the aim of winning this match and score a few goals for the goal difference, which can influence the group’s judgement.
The relationship between both associations (MFA and FIGC) is very stable. This is helping the Maltese football make the necessary improvements in order to ensure that the football in Malta grows and fulfills its potential. Some positive influences are that year after year, Maltese coaches are attending coaching seminars at Coverciano, the place where great coaches were "produced’ such as Arrigo Sacchi and Antonio Conte. A fruitful result of this relationship is that the Maltese national team is guided by an Italian coach, Pietro Ghedin, who was the assistant manager of the "Azzurri’ between 1995 and 2003 before he went to coach the female national team of Italy. Recently, we had players who also went to play for Italy, one of them being Andrei Agius who had many spells in Italy, including the successful season at Latina where he won the promotions for Serie B. Another player, Zach Muscat, is being observed by Italian scouts who represent teams from Serie B and Lega Pro. In addition to this, some Italian clubs are observing our youth players as well (aged between 16-19) and this promises to be a good help so that in the future, the mentality of the team will be different and it will help to reduce the gap with other national teams. On the other hand, every year the Maltese football see many Italian players being bought by Maltese clubs in order to help them to reach their targets. Many Italian players find Malta as a suitable place to play football because it doesn’t generate a lot of pressur. Therefore, the players can play without extra thoughts and maybe they can re-launch their careers here and reach their potential, hoping that some day, they may return to Italy to join a top club. These experiences benefit more Maltese football because ’making experiences outside of Malta, helps players to grow both as a mentality of race, and physically and because workouts are more hard abroad as here in Malta on football and are not professional.’
Obviously, Italy are the natural favourites to top this group and qualify for Euro 2016. They won their first couple of matches against Norway (0-2) and Azerbaigan (2-1) and are at the top of the group together with Croatia. Pietro Ghedin can’t be too happy about the first matches of his boys in this group, not for the results gained, but for the poor perfomances. In the first match, Malta lost 0-2 away against Croatia despite having played with 10 men for almost an hour and in the following match they got trashed by Norway at Ta’ Qali.
Malta vs Italy, a match which can be the turning point for the Maltese National team to start producing positive performances and, why not, getting a good result.
Forza Malta, always and for ever!