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This week I had the pleasure of talking to Alex Borg, Malta’s European Snooker champion. We talked about his career and what lies ahead of him in the sport of snooker. As usual, the subject of money was brought up. Malta is a small country and has its limits but some consideration has to be given to sports other than football.
In Malta we have a lot of dedicated businessmen who invest thousands in the game of football. This is good, and locally they might have some satisfaction, but lately, internationally, we do not have much to be proud of.
If just a quarter of this money had to be invested in snooker, basketball, shooting, not to mention rugby, we would indeed have something of which to be proud of.
We have a good thing going in the basketball association; the rugby team is doing wonders with such meagre resources; we have William turning heads around Europe with his shooting skills and Alex is our European Champion going on tour with the best 96 snooker players in the world.
All these sports categories, and especially snooker, are being run with few resources or none at all.We must be grateful to those dedicated people who invest so much of their time in their chosen sport and who have achieved considerable results and made us proud.
We need to push much more than football in this country. What is the use of sending your child to a football nursery when the kid wants to play basketball? Why waste the time of a coach who would prefer to invest his time in 10 kids who really want to play football, rather than teach 10 kids, and babysitting another 10 while their mother goes to the hairdresser?
More investment in all sports is necessary as we are going to lose most of our leading athletes to other countries. Our players are realising that the games they play are being taken more seriously abroad. As a result they find it very hard to refuse offers when the local scene, in several cases, offers nothing but a dead end.
sports@newsworksltd.com
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