I must declare a conflict of interest I simply cannot escape. I am an Italian football supporter and a Juventus fan patiently waiting to be condemned by the Italian Football Federation to watch Serie C football next season.

I am also the type who will carry the cross not to miss Italy play on television, nibbling nervously at peanuts whenever the ball travels perilously close to the Italian goalposts and howling at the top of my voice in a release of tension whenever the ball enters the opponents’ net.

I haven’t changed at all since the day I hurled an ashtray at my father’s television set and broke it when Juventus were unceremoniously dumped out of the Champions Cup in the 1980s by none other than Arsenal .

A recent survey indicated that for politically historical reasons the majority of Nationalist-leaning supporters are indeed Italian football fans. Now, on account of my high profile in the Labour Party, to me this is a major source of discontent. However I personally know many of my Nationalist counterparts to be fervent England fans, which provides me with some relief and consolation.

Jokes apart, the fact is that, owing to the stark uncompetitiveness of our national squad and for the regular absence of positive results on the international front, we are frustratingly unable to express our sense of nationalism as adequately as necessary – which goes a long way to explain why we take so seriously the Eurovision Song Contest where, except for a couple of performances, we have always done relatively well.

However, football is the world’s best and most popular sport and it is truly agonising that we have no option but to export our natural sentiments of loyalty and support at these times.

From this perspective, the warmth shown by ordinary Maltese for the azzurri and for the shirts sporting the cross of St George is perfectly justified. Are we expected to switch off the telly or zap to some soap opera simply because Malta is not, and will never be, among the elite of international football?

Do we really have to call ourselves slaves of a colonial mentality when we have no national team to revere as a paradigm of our national pride and no glorious achievements to hoot our horns for?

The fact that nobody bothered to notice that the world has just crowned a Maltese snooker champion right in the middle of all this World Cup madness is very unfortunate but to me comes as no surprise. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Had it not been for the World Cup I am sure there would have been a totally different reception for our Maltese snooker champ as has already been so endearingly demonstrated in the past to former local snooker and billiards champions who made it on the world stage and brought glory to Malta.

Up and coming Ghana and the impressive Ivory Coast are past colonies of the British and the French respectively. They have both made formidable progress notwithstanding this and their nationals have good reason to rejoice and celebrate.

We would have been doing the same if we had a good enough team to beat the Czech Republic roundly as Ghana did but we cannot even compete with the Ghanaians in terms of human resources. We are too small to produce competitive footballers who would attract the attention of foreign domestic leagues which will in turn help them improve their skills. The best Ghanaian players have all been handpicked by the Italian, German and English leagues. I say this not out of negativism but with a sense of realism.

It is true that the sight of cars speeding about with an arsenal of union jacks and tricolori sprouting out of the sides and the tit-for-tat messaging on mobile phones the moment Italy or England score the points can be humiliating to national pride for some. To British and Italian tourists it must be a delight. This is the inescapable reality called Malta.

But this football-mania reality is not about a nation absorbed by a colonial mentality. Preferences to Italian and British football can be explained by historical links based on strong political influences and not because we have a systematic feeling of inferiority towards powerful footballing nations like Italy and England. We express these preferences in sport, particularly in football, because we acknowledged a long time ago that no matter how hard we try there are disciplines that are unavoidably beyond our reach.

To deny this is like saying that the Pope is not a priest.

Dr Gulia is the Malta Labour Party spokesman on Home Affairs