The Nadur Youngsters are poised to make a decisive step towards the conquest of their seventh championship, the sixth since 1994/95. On Saturday, the Youngsters will face Zebbug Rovers in what many consider as their last serious obstacle towards this objective. The relegation issue has been decided and no team other than Ghajnsielem has a chance of overtaking the Youngsters at the top. So with virtually nothing to play for one cannot expect Qala St. J., Victoria H. and Xewkija T., the three remaining opponents, to offer Nadur much of a challenge in the upcoming matches.

While Nadur is a town steeped in football tradition, the Youngsters' trophy room was embarrassingly bare right up to the 1993/94 season. Until then, all they had to show for their 35 years of existence was one league championship, one second division championship and eleven triumphs in cup competitions. 

A significant strategic change was then made with regards to squad make-up. Nadur scrapped all but one or two of their perennially underachieving homegrown players and started to import ready-made stars. This shift was backed by the fundraising efforts of a small group of club officials. These administrators were ruthless in their pursuit of silverware. In their reign they changed both coaches and players as and when required without remorse. 

The Youngsters won four league championships in eight seasons, and were runners-up three times. They also won eleven other trophies. Towards the end of the 90's, the Youngsters' push seemed to have run out of steam. In the 2000/01 season, Dr. Chris Said was elected president of the Club. He had just relinquished his post of president of the G.F.A., a post which he had occupied since 1993/94--the season that marks the beginning of Nadur's aforementioned rise to prominence. At Nadur, he took over the presidency from the satiated incumbents and recruited fresh blood to assist in the administration of the club. The new crew kept the script developed in the early nineties: heavy use of ready-made players from outside the club, mid-season changes of foreign and Maltese players and a rotating door at the head coaching position. The Youngsters were soon back in business: they have won one league title, are three quarters of the way towards a second one and won two other trophies. 

In their recent clash with Ghajnsielem, Nadur had a different coach (from the one that coached them to a loss and a tie against the Blacks early in the season), a different foreigner (their second change in this department this season) and they fielded six "imported" players out of the starting eleven. Although, the presence of imports is not as marked as it was in the mid-nineties, it still shows that while the Youngsters have tried to bring youths in from their nursery they still look outwards to achieve superiority.

In the same match, the Blacks had five imported players in the starting lineup plus two more on the substitutes' bench. This is reflective of a strategy similar to the one adopted by the Youngsters. However, in the same period under discussion Ghajnsielem have in principle opted to sink or swim with their own. There has been, of course, the obligatory presence of one or two foreign players plus the permitted quota of players from Malta. But beyond that Ghajnsielem have not been extremely active on the local transfer market, until this season. 

The Club had its own reasons for taking a different road to that trekked by the Youngsters. The small matter of building and furnishing the new Club premises was one reason. The Club could not commit the same finances to the cause as the Youngsters. The Club's continued fascination with the 70's hugely successful model was another reason. In the 70's the Club rode to glory largely on the back of a group of players that graduated from the 1965/66 minor league championship winning team. One had thought that the same could be done on the back of the early 90's equally successful minor league squad. This model has failed time and again due to factors that go beyond any facile comparison between the technical abilities of the legendary Blacks and subsequent generations of Ghajnsielem players. 

The Blacks differ from the Youngsters not just in the traditional loyalty to their own, but also in the patience towards their foreign players. Perhaps, this is a case of once bitten twice shy. The Blacks' one prominent case of mid-stream change of course is the disastrous upgrading of 97/98, when young E. Digger Okonkwo, later capped by Malta, was dumped for the not-so-young Gyorgy Handel, a Youngster mid-term reject from 94/95. The two clubs more or less share the same penchant for changing coaches.

The Blacks' haul since 93/94 is: no championships, six triumphs in cup competitions, and a relegation followed by a promotion thrown in somewhere in the middle. A truly punishing deficit especially when compared to the success enjoyed by the Youngsters in the same period.