Ola! John Bonello is Spain’s amigo, but that beer ad is not so funny

John Bonello’s beer ad campaign is in full swing in Spain. The anti-hero from Spain’s epic match-saver is today the Iberian peninsula’s amigo perfecto – perfect friend. His slippery goalkeeping skills, conceding 12 goals to Spain in the last qualifier match for the 1984 European championships enamoured him to the Spaniards enough to be featured in Amstel’s beer campaign.

You can now cut out a Bonello mask from the beer’s website, which displays a proud Bonello decked in his national Malta gear and dark sunglasses: “John Bonello, the mythical keeper from the 12-1 Spain-Malta match…” the website reads. You can download his buddy icons to your desktop. Watch him in the advert being greeted at the airport by military parades and soaring fighter jets, as they welcome back a returning hero – parading through the streets in car cades, unveiling his own street name, toasted by the city’s mayor over the town hall’s balcony with a banner with “Gracias, John Bonello” emblazoned over it. “Amigo mio,” the Spanish commentary booms over the running ad, “you are the only legend”.

It was a loss set to become a common pattern for Malta’s footballing endeavours on the international playing field. The day after the infamous 21 December 1983 match, sports writer Henry Brincat ruefully mourned the death of the Maltese footballing spirit: “never in the history of Maltese soccer have we ever touched rock bottom”, Brincat wrote, suggesting that the MFA should “consider seriously a withdrawal from future competitions.”

The disastrous result certainly did not make Bonello any dearer to the Dutch, who lost out on a coveted second placing into the championships after Spain managed to seal the impossible eleven-goal gap. But as the fates would have it, it is a Dutch brewer that is using Bonello for their ad campaign, and the goalie is back in Spanish households as Amstel’s “perfect friend”.

You’ll say it is paradoxical and sardonic. Some will cry out shame. Ironic perhaps? If it was, you would have to really say that Bonello’s television foray was deliberately contrary to what one would expect, with ensuing amusement as a result. In this case, going by the words of Bonello himself, it is either incredulous or maybe, standard-issue self-interest.

“I am truly proud to be making an advert for Amstel. I mean, this is a Heineken-owned beer, you know? That’s what you should write, that a Maltese sportsman has been honoured, and that it has opened up new prospects for me,” the former goalkeeper says about his role in the beer ad.

So, it wasn’t just a humorous advert at the expense of the disastrous result for which, you among others, was blamed? “Well, the 12-1 loss is a fact. But it’s only the introduction to the advert. You are taking it wrongly. They chose me as a sportsman, not because of the game results. I was chosen from thousands who could have done the advert.”

Bonello asks whether singer Fabrizio Faniello, who now also joins the ranks of the Maltese hall of shame for his Eurovision fiasco, would have attracted this kind of flak for such an advert.

In reality, the 12-1 thrashing was never just a matter of fact for the Maltese. George Abela, who had just taken over as president of MFA, got magistrate Dennis Montebello to head an administrative inquiry into the defeat. In Faniello’s case, nobody is launching an inquiry into why his song charmed just one single point out of the extremely musical nation of Albania.

The week before the match, Malta had gone down 5-0 to the Netherlands, giving the Dutch a certain place in the eight-nation finals in France. Spain was seen as having slender hopes of scoring the 11-goal victory it needed. In Seville, weather conditions had soaked the playing field, promising a slowdown on coach Miguel Munoz’s ferocious four-man attack. After the match, Henry Brincat would write that nobody had expected the Maltese to go down so “feebly” in the second half. Today he says that blame cannot just be apportioned to Bonello alone: “At least ten of the goals were unavoidable, scored at close range which Bonello could not save… but I wouldn’t have thought twice about doing the advert – I’d think seven times before doing such an advert which throws a bad light over Maltese football.”

“We acted on the results of the inquiry,” George Abela, former MFA president, says. “Firstly that the team lacked serious professional preparation due to its lack of facilities, and secondly that there was the problem of extremely close fixtures. We had just played Holland four days before the match against Spain, both away games. It was too hectic. We avoided double fixtures from then onwards.”

And of course, there were the nasty rumours about what could have brought about the great turnaround in the second half, a neat nine-goal stretch that united all those frenzied Spanish regionalists, from the Basque country down to Andalusia where Malta was being done for with mucho gusto. “To think that we were just 3-1 down in the first half, we weren’t playing that bad. So the second half generated much talk about what went wrong with the national team,” Abela says.

“To me the advert is in bad taste, of course. That was a very bad moment for Maltese football and there is nothing to celebrate. We’d rather forget it, especially when it’s the Spaniards who are celebrating,” the former president says.

Oh, learn to laugh will you. Sure it is tactless, but you have to see the self-deprecating humour in it – isn’t that what John Bonello would say? But the former keeper insists everyone is reading the advert wrongly: that there is actually no humorous send-up of his role in the 12-1 flop.

“No I don’t it is a sarcastic advert. It is just a simple beer ad. That the result was humiliating is clear. That’s history. The message is that the Spaniards were united throughout that game. Whoever thinks it is humiliating to do such an advert is just plain ignorant. They chose me as a sportsman, not because of the game,” Bonello says.

So what about the palaver that ensued when the MFA launched its inquiry. “Nothing resulted from that inquiry. People will always spread rumours about a public figure. But the inquiry wasn’t just about me. The whole team was responsible for the result. You are making a fuss out of nothing.”

When I ask Bonello how much he was paid to do the advert, he declines to comment. “You’re quite rude, aren’t you?” he says.

But it is not just Bonello’s lampooning that provides wry satire about Malta’s lacklustre talent. He is after all a trainer for the national goalkeepers. And the fact that Amstel says Bonello fulfilled the three characteristics of the “perfect friend” – cooperation, fidelity and understanding – has a jarring crassness that is embittering to supporters who up to this day still blame Bonello for the humiliation at Seville.

Bonello has returned the favour, telling the Spanish press it was a great honour for him to be chosen as the symbol of friendship. And he doesn’t take too kindly to the critics of his new acting career, either. John Busuttil, the sports journalist whose brother Carmel had watched that match from the bench, says the ad is shameful and sets a bad example to the young goalkeepers Bonello trains at the MFA: “if John Bonello is a friend of the Spaniards, he is no friend of mine.”

“What do I care if I’m his friend or not,” Bonello replies. “Everything he says is a lie… he wouldn’t say that if it concerned a relative of his.”

Carmel Busuttil however excludes ever doing such an advert, although he says he won’t pass judgement over his former team-mate.

So is Bonello the uncrowned king of a rare strain of Maltese self-deprecation and postmodern irony (in reality he isn’t because he refuses to acknowledge the humorous parody of his skills, so that makes it tragic) – “You know, the Maltese tend to be sensitive and jealous,” Bonello says. “In the end you know who your friends are.” Well, the Spanish seem rather fond.