This was posted (not by me) on another forum I look at. It’s long but very worth the time.
I haven’t been on here in a long time, but Diego Maradona has died and I need to write something about him or I won’t feel right.
I know Maradona enjoys an – ahem – mixed legacy in this country. He’s a cheat, he’s a drug addict, he’s an embarrassment, etc. What I would like to do here is to acknowledge all those things and attempt to explain why, despite all that, he remains so important, so magnificent.
We can start with the on-pitch brilliance, with which we’re probably all by now long since familiar. That low centre of gravity, the ball skills, the vision, the leadership. Evading half the England team as they attempt to hack him to bits; punching a hole clean through the middle of the Belgian defence; juggling the ball during a pre-match warm up. It’s all been very well documented and I’m sure it will be the go-to for eulogies in the days ahead.
What I think has sometimes been overlooked is his sheer physical bravery. Playing in an era where players were strong enough to do each other real damage, playing the way he did on pitches often little better that potato fields; he was as tough as nails. This video, in particular, is an unforgettable series of clips of Diego riding challenges that seem to be intended to maim or kill him outright.
Then there are his achievements. Obviously, the World Cup, yes Napoli in Serie A and Europe. It’s a singular body of work we will probably never see again in football; the best player on the planet sat in the middle of a side that’s not really at his level, willing them on to greatness through sheer force of personality. Again, all well documented.
What I would like to focus on here are the two elements of Maradona that I feel are less commonly spoken about; the two elements which have always made him significant to me, and many millions of others across the planet.
First and foremost, Maradona conducted the single most glorious affair with the ball that the game will ever see. It’s instructive here to make the first of what will probably be several comparisons to Leo Messi, for which I can only apologise.
Watch Messi with a football; it’s his pal, trundling along by his side like a faithful dog, off on an adventure with its master, loyal and obedient. Maradona was different; you watch him with the ball – playing, warming up, goofing around in front of the cameras – and there’s an intimacy that simply doesn’t exist with any other player. There’s a finesse to his touch and a fascination in his eyes that belies the many thousands of hours he spent as a child and a young man trying to understand everything he could about this object. It’s visibly the geographic centre of his universe and he was devoted to it, even as he grew older and less able to play.
This is why many of the best clips of Diego are the ones where it’s just him and a football, and the best of all are where he doesn’t seem to know the camera is there. Doing keepie ups with his shins, juggling with his shoulders higher than I can kick a ball, backspinning it with the underside of his feet so it returns to him. It’s a love story; a dance, glorious and balletic, and his magic was never more fully in effect than in those moments, lost in a reverie. It’s the reason the famous footage of his warm up to Love Is Life is arguably THE iconic Diego moment, even more than the match footage. You can see the eternal child in him as he stretches out and explores the frontiers of what he and the ball can do together, and it humanises him even at the apex of his brilliance.
If my affinity for Maradona is rooted in Diego the Lover, let me say a word here too for Diego the Fighter, because that second aspect remains a huge huge part of his impact, and I don’t think it’s always well understood in the UK.
Half my family are Argentinean, and it’s a country I’ve spent a fair bit of time in. It’s a complicated place, and a complex culture. Football is a religion there, and Maradona remains a God, in a way that Messi, for all his superabundance of not-of-this-Earth talent, never will. Why is that the case, and why is the Hand of God incident, so central to the Maradona mythos, viewed so differently there, petty nationalism aside?
Three main reasons, as far as I can see.
The first is a high tolerance for what can only really be described as cheating. Argentinean culture is often, at its heart, Italian culture; one needs only look at the architecture, the food or even the people to know that. The country, as currently constituted, was largely built by Italian immigrants, and they retain that sneaking Italian admiration for achievements conducted off the books, so to speak.
Maradona himself was quite clear that beating the English in the manner he did was infinitely preferable to having done so by fair means; locally the goal in question was perceived of evidence of his daring, his street smarts. For what it’s worth, it’s always seemed to me that English football lives in something of a state of delusion as to its own moral rectitude; if the first goal was an example of Maradona’s low cunning, it’s quite well documented that Terry Butcher et al attempted to prevent the second by chopping their opponent down at the knees. There’s cheating and then there’s cheating, of course.
The second reason is Maradona’s background. He came from nothing. From actual dirt poverty, on a level that probably hasn’t existed in England within living memory. While the English will always love a working class hero, in Argentina that impulse is all the stronger; it’s an essential part of the Maradona mythos that he climbed from nothing and showed deference to no one. In that sense, his flaws only add to his appeal – he’s a bona fide man of the people who never once pretended to be anything more than he was; a street kid with street kid flaws who happened to have been gifted the soul of a poet.
The final reason is, for me, the most poignant of the three. National sentiment over the Falklands/Las Malvinas is relatively poorly understood outside Argentina. There’s a tremendous amount of pain and anger, commonly assumed to be directed against the English. But that’s not the case, in my experience. Spend some time in Argentina, talk to the locals and it becomes apparent, even at a distance of 40 years, that the Falklands conflict is a gaping hole in the nation’s pride. But there’s also a deep wellspring of love for England and English culture; it’s a nation that plays polo, (largely) reveres the monarchy, rabidly follows English football and loudly proclaims itself to be spiritually European, much to the chagrin of its neighbours. They’re no fans of Thatcher, but – hey – they’re not alone on that front.
What needs to be understood is how the Falklands conflict looks from the Argentinean perspective. A military government sent their boys, some essentially kids, into war with the English with inadequate training and equipment. Care packages from home were requested and did not reach their intended recipients, being raided instead by the military. This, in addition to some of the terrible treatment already afforded to the wider populace by said government. The pain and anger of the Falklands conflict isn’t an unfinished dialogue between Argentina and England, it’s an unfinished dialogue that Argentina is still working through with itself. You can draw a direct line from that suffering and humiliation to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, it’s all the same pain.
Why does this matter for Maradona? Because the Hand of God, taken in context of the elements above, represented for Argentina and for Argentineans a moment of profound depuration, wherein they were able to cast off some of their pain and degradation. He struck a blow for all those who had suffered; not just in the conflict itself, but at the hands of the junta. He gave a release to the great unspoken tension within the nation’s life, and reinserted some pride into the national character. That he did it by cheating made it all the sweeter; like a thief in the night, he stole back for Argentina a dignity thought lost. And he followed it up by scoring probably the greatest goal the sport will ever see.
People in this country talk endlessly about David Beckham’s 2001 free kick against Greece. Beckham’s goal prevented England from having to go to a play off to qualify for the 2002 World Cup Finals. Against Ukraine. Those were the stakes. It’s still a big deal nearly two decades later.
Try to imagine, for a moment, what that 1986 quarter final meant to the people of Argentina. It’s David Beckham, Robin Hood and Winston Churchill rolled into one, with the additional bonus of our hero having unapologetically emerged from absolutely grinding poverty. Obviously, he didn’t stop there either – he was absolutely electric in each of the knockout games, and won the trophy virtually single handed. The sheer romance of it all is nigh on unbearable.
I know there is the other view of Maradona; the drugs, the weight gain, the bad behaviour in public. He’s an easy figure to mock, utterly fallible and brought to Earth by his appetites, in every sense. But he never pretended to be anything other than what he was, never really bothered to hide his flaws. He delivered such joy to so many people, and – at his best – he was so full of life and possessed of such enormous character; he genuinely made you believe that anything was possible.
He also played the game with his heart on his sleeve, for good or ill. Less a smoothly calibrated professional of the type that dominates the modern game, more an overgrown schoolboy living out his dreams on the playground and then waking up to find they’d all come true.
That’s the Argentina end of things. We could talk about Napoli too, but I’m far less equipped to speak to that, and the eponymous documentary released last year covers it very well.
Diego Maradona’s life is a modern-day fairy tale. A fairy tale with bucketloads of substance abuse, but a fairy tale nonetheless. It’s the reason that you will find a picture of him on or around every bar in Buenos Aires, the reason his image is plastered all over Napoli and the reason I worshipped him as a child. He’s the representative of a genuine underclass, hailing from a nation whose best days are probably behind it, who by brilliance and force of personality upset the natural order of things and delivered catharsis to his people in the country of Argentina and the city of Naples. Not only that, but he did so while playing with a grace and style that were and remain all his own.
There will be other footballers, brilliant footballers, who will eclipse his deeds. Messi arguably already has. Others who are far more professional, whose careers stretch longer and who keep it together better. There will never be another player with a talent ceiling as high as Diego’s. There will never be another player with an ability to bend an entire tournament to their will as Diego did when at his best. There will never be another player whose peak will be so stratospherically high from both a football and cultural perspective. There will never be another player who will make a football dance the way he did.
They’ve just announced three days of national mourning in Argentina. Hopefully the above paints a picture as to why; it’s the least he deserves.
Farewell, Diego Armando Maradona. Thank you for lighting up my childhood, for your courage, your daring and the sheer grace and beauty of your play. You made me love football all the more, made my dreams a little deeper and my soul a little less earthbound.
