While all attention will now focus on South Africa for the World Cup, which is due to begin in a few days’ time, another World Cup is being played on Maltese, or rather Gozitan, soil.

This is the final of the World Cup for ‘Peoples without nations’ and the team representing Padania has just beaten the team representing the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to reach, for the third consecutive time, the final.

Padania reminds one and all of Lega Nord, the party that is part of Berlusconi’s government, and of Umberto Bossi, its leader. In fact, Renzo Bossi, his son, together with his two younger brothers, Roberto, 18, and Sirio, 15, have been in Gozo to egg on their team to success.

The Italian papers yesterday reported the match with some detail and with particular interest, seeing it was a match between the team representing Italy’s wealthy north and the team representing Italy’s south, so full of history but also of poverty.

The game, report the Italian media, was a balanced one until half time when Mr Bossi entered the dressing room and made a scene, telling the team in no uncertain terms that losing was not an option.

There seem to have been few spectators at the match, which included the Padania female football team managed by Sandro Pietro Mazzola, son of the famous former captain of Internazionale.

The game seems to have been played with some aplomb, although also with some comments passed with regard to the referee who hailed from Kurdistan and was considered by the Lega supporters as nothing more than an illegal immigrant.

On their part, the Two Sicilies team also added to the atmosphere of a historic re-enactment: they even showed their new passport and a banknote of one ducat.

In the end, with the entrance to the Padania side of former professional football player Maurizio Ganz, who scored the winning goal, the game was theirs. Renzo Bossi rushed to call his father with the news, receiving the reply that the Senatur would have liked to come and watch the final against Kurdistan, but he had another commitment in Milan – Miss Padania. Had he come, he would have come to a place even more south of the South he so speaks about.