Tonight is the night. It’s the culmination of months of knockout and league phases. The two finalists will meet in Rome to decide which is the best football team in Europe.

This year, the finalists are Manchester United and Barcelona. Not many will have real qualms about the finalists, except perhaps the Chelsea fans who had a very good case against the Norwegian ref who officiated their semi-final against eventual finalists Barcelona.

But what will happen in Malta tonight? Extreme polarisation of course. We are used to the usual Anglo-Italo conflict between local supporters, but it will go even deeper than that.

While most of the people in England will be rooting for Man Utd to win, with perhaps the exception of Liverpudlians, Maltese fans who support other English teams (and of course every single Italy fan) will be dead against the Red Devils. You can bet your last Euro that English fans of Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea, Boro, Fulham, Everton and Newcastle will all be waving the banner in their living rooms or pubs in England, cheering United on.

Yet in Malta, you can guarantee that most fans of any English team will be against Man United and will probably side with Barcelona. Why is that? Perhaps because the issue of national pride is not at stake and we would rather look at it from the point of view that an enemy of my enemy is my friend. Rival Maltese England fans would rather that a Spanish team wins the trophy than Manchester United.

We have long said that our national sport is politics and it’s easy to see why. We cannot compete at top level in most sport, our music scene is limited (although there are some very good artists) and our idea of national pride is limited only to battling illegal immigration.

So that very mentality which we have just mentioned – an enemy of my enemy is my friend - transposes into our interpretation of politics. What is very worrying is that while we say our people have matured in a political sense, we still revert to our childish ways come election time. Forget the family spats, the pub and bar arguments and the workplace confrontations, let us look beyond that. Come election time, the country splits in two – and it’s even more worrying when the surveys tell you that we are supposedly not as interested in elections as we were in the past.

Come campaign time, and make no mistake we are in the thick of one, the Maltese seemingly find that big red button in the recesses of our brains labeled ‘commonsense’ and we turn it off.

For some bizarre reason, a large proportion of our people automatically believe everything that is fed to them on a spoon. You can’t blame the politicians – it’s their message at the end of the day. People are supposed to digest what is put forward by politicians, put it into a bigger context and formulate an educated opinion. Put quite simply – the vast majority of us do not. We simply listen, nod our heads and believe everything that is fed to us by party machinery.

Unfortunately, on some occasions, individual politicians as well as parties take advantage of this behaviour and the split widens. What this newspaper objects to is when these issues spill out onto matters of national interest. It is not the purpose of this leader to discuss those issues, but rather, to question the mentality of the voter. One wonders, who will the victor be when PN FC face PL FC come 6 June? Again, the purpose is not to predict a winner, but to question the merits of the victory which will be gained. Divided we stand, divided we will fall.