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.
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