OKMalta.com still Malta’s best 4‑man bowling team

The elite bowling team “OK‐ Malta.com” have won the Divi‐ sion 1 title (the Malta Bowling Association’s highest tier na‐ tional league) for a seventh con‐ secutive time.

The elite bowling team “OK‐ Malta.com” have won the Malta Bowling Association’s top na‐ tional league, Division 1, for a seventh consecutive time. They successfully retained their league title on the final day of league versus the league run‐ ners‐up “Tm Brunswick”.

Tm Brunswick, led by Sue Abela, had an opportunity to steal the league title for them‐ selves in this final match‐up of the season, though they had to win all three games by a consid‐ erable margin in order to shift the tiebreaker of overall pinfall scored into their favour; mean‐ while, OKMalta.com only re‐ quired to win or draw one out of the three games to confirm an‐ other league title. Game 1 kicked off in the electric start that Tm Brunswick hoped for as they not only beat their opponents to keep their title hopes alive, but they rolled a stupendous 954 team game (245‐257‐268‐184) to shock their opponents with the best team game of the season amongst all Division 1 teams.

However, the reigning champi‐ ons fought hard in Game 2 and while both sides were neck‐and‐ neck going into the final two frames, all players for OK‐ Malta.com managed to strike in crunch time to tip the league de‐ cider in their favour. They won this game via the score line 797‐ 836, and thus, got the points re‐ quired to confirm yet another Di‐ vision 1 title. The final game was still played, though its result wouldn’t affect any standings, and Tm Brunswick came out the victors of the final game (789‐ 781).

In this league format, ten of the best teams in the MBA face off weekly in 4v4 play where each match is decided on 3‐game se‐ ries. During this particular cam‐ paign, teams faced each other once over nine total weeks in a single‐rounded format, rather than the typical format featur‐ ing two rounds of play and 18 total gameweeks. This triumph means that OKMalta.com have been Malta’s best bowling team for 3 full years now – a streak stretching back to 2019, before the COVID‐19 pandemic hit.

They have done this through keeping the same core roster, their current roster consists of the five top players: Dennis Mercieca, Kenneth Arpa, Rankin Camilleri, Mauro Anastasi, and youth bowler Nicholas Muscat. Kenneth Arpa is Malta’s current national champion, Mauro Anas‐ tasi was the national champion for the five years prior to Arpa’s victory this year, Mercieca and Camilleri have represented Team Malta on several occa‐ sions, and Nicholas Muscat re‐ cently won a silver medal and two bronze medals at the Euro‐ pean Youth Championships (EYC 2022) this September.

Sue Abela’s “Tm Brunswick” finished second in the league standings and was comprised of her teammates Kayden La‐ ganà, Nicolai Mallia, Chris Fenech, Daniel Grech, and Matthew Magro. In third place was the team “Supersonic”, which fields the players Matthew Muscat, Daniel Ricciari, Kyle Patrick Camilleri, Clayton Zammit Cesare, and Giancarlo Tolu.