vim 7.x and matchit plugin

For a few months I have been trying to make my vim (7.2.330) in Ubuntu 10.04 work with matchit plugin. But it never wanted to cooperate. The matchit plugin works perfectly with my vim 6.4.6 by simply downloading/unzipping the match.zip from here and adding the following line to ~/.vimrc file.

:source {path_to_matchit_plugin}/matchit.vim

But for vim 7.x, the following line has be to added to ~/.vimrc as well:

:filetype plugin on