The 18th Commonwealth Games held in Melbourne, Australia have come and gone. It is difficult to describe such Games for someone not present as the Aussies really planned and organised a wonderful event comprising over 10 days of impeccable organisation and top level sports.
I had the opportunity to be present for these Games where I even represented Malta in the officiating field, obviously in my sport, basketball. On hindsight I feel very proud to have done so and am extremely satisfied of my performance.
As for the Maltese contingent, I cannot describe the atmosphere around the team as I was not staying in the Athletes’ Village. Technically speaking, although I also represented Malta, I was not part of the MOC contingent and instead formed part of technical officials’ contingent hosted in the centre of Melbourne.
In fact, we were over 1,100 officials (from all the different sports) in all staying in two adjoining hotels. Unfortunately, despite this big number, I had to content myself as being the only Maltese there.
As I wrote in one of the previous columns, the atmosphere in the Officials’ ‘village’ was very nice as you could witness the vast majority of officials (especially those from fast moving and subjective sports like basketball and rugby) getting geared up for their assignments.
The basketball tournament (where the 3-man referee system was used in all games) was quite long, comprising eight consecutive competitive days in all. Eight different countries competed in the respective men and women competitions. In the group stage, there were two respective groups comprising each of four countries who played round robin games. Eventually the top two teams from each group qualified for the semi-final stage with the remaining teams playing the classification games.
In total we were 18 basketball referees coming from different parts of the world, each one of us nominated for these games by our world governing body, FIBA. Personally, I had just one day off, this being the third day of competition.
The games during the first five days were played in regional centres around Melbourne city. I had the opportunity to work in three different places, namely Bendigo (almost 3 hours away from Melbourne), Geelong and Ballarat (another venue, Traralgon, was used). This resulted in quite an amount of journey time going and coming for the games for the whole officiating crew.
The reception by the crowds at this early stage of competition was awesome as one could immediately and easily notice the Aussies’ love for the game. One could see that there was an obvious love for anything that was green and gold (Australia’s colours) yet the crowds were very hospitable and made all the teams feel very welcome.
At this stage I had the opportunity to work two games from the respective categories, namely South Africa vs. New Zealand and Australia vs. India from the men’s tournament and Nigeria vs. Malaysia and Australia vs. England from the women’s competition.
In the last four days (where the semi-finals and finals, and also all the classification games, where to be played) the games were hosted at the magnificent Melbourne Multi-Purpose Venue. This is a sports complex which can seat over 10,000 fans (it was a practical sold-out session each time games were on both in the morning and in the evening) in a comfortable manner and also containing high-technological equipment.
At this final stage I was delighted to be assigned some important matches, starting with the women semi-final between New Zealand and England. The day after I had the men’s semi-final contested by Nigeria and New Zealand. At this point it already felt a dream come true.
The last game was one that I am really proud of as this was the women’s final between Australia and New Zealand eventually won by the former. It was a great experience to work this game and following it I also had the opportunity to meet, for a few minutes, Australia’s Prime Minister Mr. John Howard who attended the basketball finals and gave his support to the Aussies.
During the whole basketball competition, directed by FIBA’s top technical delegate Mr. Lubomir Kotleba, there was also an excellent team of four game commissioners (Steve Smith, Bill Middenhall, John Martin and Greg Love) who gave invaluable feedback to all the 18 referees working the games.
From the organisational part for the referees’ team, there was a formidable group who one could only describe as being truly pro-active in all senses. Everything was practically catered for in the best way. In fact, the organisers of Beijing 2008 sent a team of around dozen people to oversee how the basketball competition was run. If the 2008 Olympic tournament is to be run similarly, then it would be a definite success.
As many are also aware, Malta also competed in the basketball competition in the female category. I will devote the coming article to talk about this venture and also comment on the rest of the Maltese contingent’s performance especially William Chetcuti’s enormous talent (which will eventually strike a major gold if allowed to develop in as much as possible a stress-free environment) and Simon Gerada’s end-of-game incident as recounted to me by one of the world’s top table tennis officials who witnessed the event.
The opening and closing ceremonies will also be mentioned in the next column.
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