RIP Maradona

Like the rest of the football-fan world I was stunned this week to see that Diego Maradona had died. I saw it on the BBC's website on Wednesday morning, so early, in fact, that when I googled it the snippet from his Wikipedia page that shows up on the first page of results still showed him as being alive. Since then I've been listening to football podcasts talking about his legacy, and reading whatever I could find about him.

I have to say, though, that his death doesn't hit me as strongly as perhaps it does other football fans of my generation, simply because I got into football after his heyday. In fact, I started watching with the 1994 World Cup, but only started paying attention after he'd been sent home for failing a drug test. So my knowledge of him comes filtered through secondary sources, of which the majority are English, so a little biased.

But I do also remember summer trips to Italy as a child in the 80s, and hearing his name mentioned almost breathlessly by various cousins. This would have been the period in which he was playing at Napoli, though I had no understanding of it until years later. And effectively, you can't deny that he did something impressive by joining a team that hadn't been that good and taking them to the Scudetto... twice. As someone said on either Football Weekly or Totally Football, it's hard to imagine the world's most exciting player of today going to some unknown team and dragging it to the league title almost single-handedly.

As for his presence at World Cups, what I know of him there comes almost exclusively from British reporting on the 1986 World Cup, which is hailed as both his showcase tournament and the best World Cup of recent times. Inevitably I heard about the Hand of God goal first, but to their credit the British media are just as likely to tell you about his second in that game against England, where he ran past five England players to score the winner.

That game took place in a time when it was harder to find out about footballers outside the country you lived in, so someone could pop up in an international tournament like that and blow everyone away. It was also a time when leagues in Europe weren't yet hoovering up talent from abroad as soon as it showed the least amount of potential, so a player like Maradona could develop his talent at home in Argentina before making the transition to Europe.

On the other hand, it was also a time when clubs just brought in players from abroad and left them to sort themselves out in a new country, which may have contributed to Maradona's downfall. He arrived in Barcelona at the age of 22 or so, which meant he wasn't particularly worldly yet, and his career after that was marked by chaos and misbehavior - one story I saw this week involved him partying with Colombian narco Pablo Escobar, at the latter's own prison.

Maradona's legacy may have also screwed up Argentina's national team for a long time to come. Ever since his retirement, any promising new Argentine player has been held up (somewhat desperately) as the new Maradona. Most haven't lived up to this potential, but the one who did, Lionel Messi, may be the unluckiest of all in this respect. He moved to Barcelona from Argentina as a child, with his whole family, which limited his ability to get into trouble (other than tax stuff), but that meant he hasn't been steeped in Argentine culture the way Maradona was.

Moreover, because of the world's search for the next Maradona, Messi and other Argentine players tend to be selected on the basis of their attacking prowess, which has left the national team pretty unbalanced with regard to midfield and defense. So while Messi is just as able to drag his compatriots to a final as Maradona was, he's surrounded by less accomplished players, and that may have made all the difference.

The other interesting point, made on Football Weekly, was in contrasting Messi and Maradona directly. The guest, Jonathan Wilson, called Messi's talent difficult to love, because it's so otherworldly, whereas Maradona was a completely fallible human whose talent was divine. I don't entirely agree, since Messi has always struck me as a player who makes you happy to watch, but there's something to the point that Maradona's volatility was part and parcel of his talent.

He was a good story because he was so chaotic and unpredictable - in the same match cheating egregiously and then scoring one of the finest goals ever. It's a shame, but also probably for the best, that we won't see a talent like his again soon, even if Messi surpasses him technically.

Covid hits home

A short one today, as my family has experienced two close Covid-19-related deaths in the past week.

One was on my mom's side of the family, in Rome, an old friend of my grandmother's from when they lived in Romania in the 1930s. They were so close in those days, and in the days after the war, that their children effectively grew up together with my mom and considered each other cousins. They're still friends to this day, which is what makes the loss more painful for her.

The other death is my dad's older sister, who was also my godmother. She had a difficult time of it from an early age, with her interest in painting curtailed by mental illness that plagued her through her life. Between that, and illness caused by decades of smoking, she had to go live in an assisted living facility several years ago, which is where our current plague found her, after several months cut off from her family.

Both deaths were in Italy, which has little directly to do with our current surge in cases here in the US. But for those gearing up to get on a plane to visit relatives, please think of who you're going to encounter while you travel. The people in the airport, or train station, or gas station might not believe in wearing masks, or might know people who think the virus is a hoax. You might not feel bad when you meet your parents, or cross paths with an assisted-living nurse - you might not feel bad at all throughout the time you have the virus.

But the virus doesn't care - it's opportunistic and fast. My aunt was diagnosed last week and was asymptomatic until this morning, at which point they rushed her to the hospital. She died seven hours later.

So please stay home. Take care of yourselves, and take care of others, by limiting your travels and visits to bars and other public places. The most vulnerable people in society - the old, the ill and the poor - are being decimated by this thing and so it's up to us to help keep them safe.

Messi vs Ronaldo - the other one

My walks, when not accompanied by podcasts, tend to be fertile times for interesting thoughts, and this past week I found myself wondering if Lionel Messi, despite being the GOAT, hasn't failed to live up to potential. Or if not failed to live up to his potential, then whether his achievements with the Argentine national team haven't lived up to his achievements with Barcelona.

This thought reminded me of another player I (unaccountably) think hasn't necessarily lived up to his potential, which is to say Ronaldo. But not Cristiano Ronaldo, rather the Brazilian player dubbed O Fenômeno.

Ronaldo, who was initially known as Ronaldinho (Little Ronaldo) and whom I now sometimes uncharitably call Ronaldão (Big Ronaldo), isn't necessarily someone you'd consider a failure, since he led his team to two consecutive World Cup finals (1998 and 2002) and won the latter, almost single-handed, as well as the 1994 medal, though he wasn't as involved in that tournament. He also picked up three titles playing across seven clubs in four countries, netted 352 goals and won the Ballon d'Or twice.

When you compare Big Ron to Messi, though, he looks a poor second in terms of sheer numbers: Messi has won 10 league titles and four Champions Leagues, all with Barcelona, netting 640 goals across 741 games and winning the Ballon d'Or 6 times. Though when you look at their respective international careers, Ronaldo comes out clearly on top, since he won those aforementioned World Cups as well as two editions of the Copa America.

Turning to personal perceptions of these players, it also comes down to my earliest experiences watching them. I still kinda see Big Ron as someone who didn't live up to potential because of how he completely went missing in the 1998 World Cup final against France. His poor performance in that match was a result of a convulsive fit the night before the match, but given my distaste for the Brazilian national team after they beat Italy on penalties in 1994, it was satisfying to see the juggernaut stopped. That made it easy to discount his role pulling Brazil to the final four years later, in Japan and South Korea (his silly haircut also caused me to discount his footballing prowess).

Messi, on the other hand, first came on my radar as a rumor from my friends who were more plugged into Spanish football, and then as a series of highlight reels spotted on YouTube. Probably the first time I watched a full match in which he played was the 2009 Champions League final, in which he and Barcelona dismantled Manchester United. And again, personal preferences colored my perception of that game, since I was annoyed at Man United's strong record against Italian teams (especially Juventus). The fact that he did it again two years later just cemented him in my mind as one of the greatest I've ever seen.

Personal biases and raw scoring numbers are poor substitutes for really gauging how great a player is, of course, though for most of us they're all we have to go on. The accepted idea is that Messi is the most natural footballer of his generation, while Cristiano Ronaldo (hereafter dubbed CR7) is the embodiment of drive to become one of the best ever. This implies that quality is effortless for Messi, and that Cristiano Ronaldo is less gifted; but of course Messi's perfection is honed by relentless practice, while CR7's drive to win and be the best wouldn't be possible without his ferocious natural talent.

So where does this leave Big Ron? The consensus, at least per his wikipedia page, is that he embodied the greatest talent, especially in his early years, of the last few decades, more so than either Messi or CR7, despite their longer careers and longer time at the top of the game. If nothing else, he boasted a 63.3% goalscoring record for Brazil, which put him ahead of CR7 (60.4%) and Messi (50.4%), despite them having both played more games and scored more goals overall.

The other reason it's easy to forget about him is that he shared the Ballon d'Or and other European accolades with other great players of his era, whereas Messi and CR7 have locked those trophies up between them for over a decade.

In the end it comes down to whether you think a player's club career or international career is more prestigious. Messi's titles with Barcelona blow out of the water not only O Fenômeno but also his traditional rival CR7. The areas where CR7 beats Messi are in Champions Leagues won, games played and goals scored for his clubs. Fairly or not, it also apparently looks better that Messi did it all with just one club, whereas CR7 did it with four.

But the lack of World Cups or Copas America will surely rankle with Messi, especially since he pretty much single-handedly dragged Argentina to the finals in Brazil 2014. Even CR7 won a European Championship with Portugal in 2016. But Ronaldo, O Fenômeno, beats them both.

Don't Be Fooled as 2020 Threatens to Come Good at the End

It felt like it'd never happen, but the 2020 election has come and gone, and it went to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. There were a few nail-biting moments there, when certain states showed up with early Republican leads, and despite the calls from the likes of Nate Silver's 538, it was hard to feel confident about a blue shift from the postal ballots being counted after the same-day ballots.

The Election Day violence and intimidation seems not to have materialized, though that could be because no one reported on it (the intimidation, at least) or because the majority of Democrats voted by mail, meaning there were fewer people for white supremacists to intimidate at the polling stations. The attempts to steal the election do seem to have materialized, but luckily the Republicans (or more specifically the Trump administration) have been so ham-handed about it that even Fox News hasn't propagated their false claims.

My worry is that the relatively orderly election leads to a feeling of returning to normalcy for the incoming administration. The fact that the Electoral College didn't contradict the popular vote this time around, and the fact that the vote-counting infrastructure at state level were actually honest and not bought off by Trump supporters seem reassuring, but could just end up masking our system's in-built flaws until someone comes along who really knows how to take advantage of them.

This isn't an idle worry, since the "blue wave" we were promised didn't really materialize down the ballot. It looks like the Republicans cut in the Democrats' lead in the House (though without taking back control), and it looks like they're maintaining their lead in the Senate. With Mitch McConnell still leading the Senate GOP, we can expect four more years of obstructionism and zero-sum-game politics, where the Republicans will be playing to stop the Democrats from winning, rather than proposing their own agenda (and to be fair, this isn't surprising, since the GOP didn't even offer a platform for the election this year).

The other problem to think about is what all those Trump voters are going to do for the next four years. There are 71 million of them out there, and while they surely aren't all Proud Boys or whatever unpresentable group you want to name, the madness that the Trump presidency unleashed is going to poison our politics for a long time to come. If nothing else, that madness will come back in four years, when Trump presumably attempts to run again (or his daughter does, or Tom Cotton, or some other monstrosity), but the real worry is that they'll come back in just two years to grab the House in the midterms.

After all, the effect may be less pronounced than in the Senate, but the House is also prey to the demographic advantage the Republicans have by controlling the non-urban districts. And the fact that Representatives serve two-year terms means that the fundraising for 2022 starts now, with all the dark money presumably going to races that could prove decisive in two years.

In the meantime, the Republican stranglehold on the judiciary continues. It's not just the Supreme Court, which is bad enough, but they've filled more lower-level judgeships in the past four years than Obama did, so the pool for Biden and presumably Harris to appoint from will be very heavily Republican to start with. The big challenges to a progressive agenda are going to come from that quarter, so I hope the Democrats are taking it seriously.

On the plus side, Biden's win seems to have the Brits scared now that they won't have the US backing them up on Brexit. Jokes about him being Irish aside, I'd like to see Biden be constructive and steer the UK back from the brink of a hard Brexit, especially one that endangers the Good Friday Agreement - and hopefully it will also provide an opportunity for the political climate in the UK to calm down again after the last four years post-Brexit referendum.

My other foreign policy wish, though this is much more remote, is that Biden reverses the policy of the past two decades in the South China Sea, of pulling back its forces and allowing China into the vacuum. This policy has allowed China to bully the smaller countries and influence them unduly - an reinvigorated American show of soft power (backed by good-faith attempts to create trading and cultural links) will help show the benefits of good governance and provide an alternative to the Chinese Communist Party's way of doing things abroad.

And of course, the big thing on my mind is the coronavirus. Biden has already named a task force to tackle the pandemic, but it's clear that it'll be with us for a while even in the best-case scenario. As my girlfriend pointed out today, quoting from a tweet she saw, it wouldn't do to get the virus now, before we start to make actual progress against it. We'll have to maintain vigilance and avoid ending the shutdowns and mask mandates until any successful vaccines have been rolled out to enough people.

But with all those caveats out of the way, it's nice to see that things have a chance of righting themselves. I don't want to say "go back to normal", because the "normal" of the past two decades wasn't that great. But good governance will make for a nice start.