A visitor to Malta these past days would have been bemused to see the intense rivalry between Maltese supporters of the Italian football national team and those of the English team. Houses and cars were bedecked with the respective flags and last Sunday evening was a very quiet one until the final whistle went, and supporters of the winning team caroused and carcaded all over Malta.

A visitor to Malta would have just grasped the bare essentials. A more intimate knowledge of what goes on in our country would have revealed huge volumes on the intensity of the competition and the allegiance.

This is only football, after all, a game, but it is taken very seriously in the context of this Italy and England rivalry. It resembles, as many have pointed out, our intense rivalry when a general election comes around.

Many may disagree with the following, but there is more resemblance between the way the two teams play than a strong dissimilarity. And whatever people may say, there are more similarities between the two political parties than dissimilarities. And yet, people do get very passionate about their support for either foreign national team as people get heated over their respective political parties.

To be sure, there is a marked difference between the intensity of political allegiance and football allegiance. Many have been supporting the same national team since their childhood, as they would also have been supporting the same political party. But in the case of football, while you would find support for the same national team going back generations, there are also cases where father and son hold opposite views, or when brothers and sisters support different teams.

This is only football, after all. But to find out the reasons for this polarity and this rivalry, a historical contest must not be overlooked.

Let’s start with Italy. For many centuries, starting from prehistoric times when Malta was joined to the Sicilian mainland, Malta was part of Sicily, rather than Italy. If not the temple-builders, at least the settlers after that came from Sicily. When the Muslims depopulated Malta, families from Sicily were brought over to repopulate it.

Malta got its language, a dialect of Arabic, not from North Africa, recent studies have shown, but from the Arabic speakers in Sicily. Thenceforth, after the Norman conquest, Malta was an integral part of the Sicilian kingdom and the ‘Sicilian Vespers’ freed not just Sicily but also Malta.

Ironically, when Malta was handed over to the Order of St John, relations at all levels between Malta and Sicily increased and multiplied.

When Napoleon kicked the Knights out, the official language, the language of civil administration, of the courts and the Church, of instruction and culture, was solely Italian. The British, of course, could not accept that and so began a decade-long project to replace the Italian official language with the English one.

Hence the bitterly-fought ‘language problem’ of the 1930s which led, more as an escape route than a planned expansion, to the emergence of a standardised Maltese language, recognised at last as a language in its own right.

This political foray on the part of the Italian language quickly became contaminated with Fascist overtones and when Italy entered World War II on the side of Nazi Germany and Italian planes began bombing Malta, any love for Italy and its language and culture was swiftly smothered.

But just 30 years after that, television came to Malta and RAI preceded TVM by some important years. The Maltese quickly warmed to Italian and its television song programmes... and Italian football.

There we more or less stand today. English is today the principal language of Malta while Maltese is still generally spoken by most Maltese. But for many Maltese, the Italian roots go far deeper than any other cultural links and, although most Maltese understand Italian, few actually speak it.

But when the Inno di Mameli is heard, even though hardly any Maltese know the words, many Maltese hearts go aflutter. On the other hand, the God save the Queen brings back memories of colonial times, Trooping of the Colour at the Floriana Xagħra, red post office boxes and phone booths. For some Maltese, the sun still shines out of the Union Jack, but usually such people had a comfortable life when the rest were suffering pangs of hunger.

It’s only a game after all. We have to remember that.