72 2GM Thursday November 26 2020 | the timesSport
June 2, 1979 Aged 18,
Maradona stars for
Argentina against Scotland
at Hampden Park, scoring
his first international goal
in a 3-1 win.July 2, 1982 Sent off for
Argentina against Brazil
with his team on the verge
of a World Cup exit, plantinghis studs into the thigh of
Batista, the midfielder.Sept 24, 1983 Playing for
Barcelona, his ankle is
broken by a challenge from
Andoni Goikoetxea, the
“Butcher of Bilbao”.June 22, 1986 Scores both
goals in Argentina’s 2-1 winover England in the World
Cup quarter-final: punches
in the first and runs from
his own half for the second.June 29, 1986 (right) Caps
a brilliant tournament by
teeing up Argentina’s late
winning goal for Jorge
Burruchaga in the final
against West Germany.May 3, 1987 Inspires
Napoli to become Italian
champions for the first
time, a title they clinch with
a draw away to Como.May 17, 1989 Napoli lift
their only European trophy,
securing an aggregate
success over Stuttgart in
the Uefa Cup final.Apr 29, 1990 A win over
Lazio secures his second
Serie A title with Napoli.July 8, 1990 Argentina lose
the World Cup final to West
Germany and a tearful
Maradona refuses to shake
hands with Fifa president
João Havelange during the
medal ceremony.The life and
times of
a legend
By Bill Edgar30, which is Christmas Day for this particular
religion. There was a crib, and you can guess
who was Jesus, clad in a No 10 shirt, with Johan
Cruyff, Pelé and Alfredo Di Stéfano as the wise
men paying homage.
Dalma, Maradona’s eldest daughter, once
agreed to attend a meeting of the Iglesia
Maradoniana in a restaurant. Half a dozen
devotees suddenly appeared in white tunics,
holding a rosary like they were in church.
They chanted that Maradona was a saint.
“Then two people got married using El Diego,
my dad’s autobiography, like it was a Bible,
placing their hands on it,” Dalma explained. “It
started to get embarrassing when they began to
worship me. They are really nice, good people
but I told them they are crazy.”Sport Diego Maradona 1960-2020
T
hat he had such peerless control of a
ball, and so little restraint over much
of the rest of his existence, made Diego
Armando Maradona arguably the
greatest and definitely the most
compelling footballer that ever lived.
In Maradona we found colossal strength yet
some of the worst of human frailties; beautiful
miracles and self-destructive wreckage; a
strikingly handsome man who could swell
grotesquely; who could bring delight to millions
across the planet yet cruelty to those closest to
him. Yesterday the world mourned the death of
the player, the icon, at 60 — but it could also
celebrate that he packed ten lives into that time.
Of course, Englishmen are not meant to be
captivated by Maradona. We are meant to be
repelled and some, even now, are still holding a
petty grudge. Pathetically.
I spent more than two years researching
Maradona’s life for a book, Maradona Opus, due
to be published in March — he was meant to
come over to help launch it — and the closer
I got to him the more I was transfixed.
He did not always make it easy to admire him.
All was arranged to interview Maradona at his
home in Buenos Aires, to reflect on his life’s
glory and chaos (no shortage of either). But
Diego is Diego. Greatness, like royalty, gives you
certain privileges, including the ability to keeppeople waiting indefinitely — as we did for an
entire day only to find out that he had vanished
into the night. We flew back another time, all
the way to the Argentine capital, to meet him.
Again, he had a better offer.
To finally catch up with him was worth those
air miles and cancellations. Most of us spend
our lives compromising, conforming, fitting in.
Maradona oozed outrageousness, rebellion,
fearlessness. He was 5ft 5in but with a
towering personality.
To meet him — to talk about goals and drugs,
grasping the World Cup and how the love of his
daughters dragged him back several times from
the brink of addiction and death — was to be
captivated not only by his achievements but by
an extremely rare life force.My favourite photograph of Maradona shows
him gazing murderously along the line of
players before Argentina’s classic confrontation
with England in 1986. It is the face of a leader —
not only of a team but of a nation of more than
30 million people — who was going to shape
history that afternoon, whatever it took.
Genius? Cheat? Think what you like of
Maradona, but to have visited Villa Fiorito is
not the only reason — though it remains a very
good one — why I have always found myself
celebrating the man and his life. I wrote about
that trip recently, as Maradona battled a bleed
on the brain that we thought he had overcome:
about the shanty town outside Buenos Aires
where he was born and raised, the best place to
start understanding the phenomenon.
I stood in the dilapidated single-storey shack
at 523 Azamor. This was where, legend has it,
Maradona was hauled out of an open sewer by
an uncle, stinking of crap. To stand in that
lowliest of settings and imagine that a kid could
climb from here to reach the top of the world,
whose death could spark such a global
outpouring of grief and reverence, was mind-
boggling. What talent, what drive, what spirit to
elevate yourself from this barrio to a sporting
deity, to champion of the world.
It was a journey that took Maradona to places
he could never imagine — or prepare for —
which is why I left Villa Fiorito with a new sense
of understanding and, yes, sympathy, for some
of the mayhem and madness that was to come.
As a biographer, tracing his journey is like
coming across the aftermath of a series of wild
parties. A huge amount of fun has been had
but there are piles of wreckage left to sift
through. Genius, havoc, excess. That is the
Maradona effect, always leaving some sort of
unforgettable memory and, yes, sometimes an
ineradicable stain.
For a man of extremes, Naples always was
going to be the best and worst place for
Maradona to move to; an area of volcanoes,
eruptions and earthquakes; a city with a
dangerous edge; a downtrodden region in need
of an iconoclastic hero. Maradona fitted right in.
I visited the city on the bay several times to
gain a sense of the impact Maradona had there
between 1984 and 1991, including the shrine for
him on one street which supposedly contains a
strand of his hair. This was the city where, as
he led the club to two Serie A titles against the
might of AC Milan, they put a sign up on a
cemetery wall saying, “You don’t know what
you’ve missed”. Someone scrawled a response:
“How do you know we missed it?”
If he could not raise the dead, he could make
you believe in miracles. Arrigo Sacchi, the
revered coach of Milan, explained to me how
Maradona claimed to have struck a free kick
with such accuracy that he deliberately flicked
Ruud Gullit’s dreadlocks on the way into the
top corner. A boast too far? Sacchi said that
he would not have believed it from anyone
but Maradona.
Rivals did not have a bad word to say about
him, even knowing that Naples was where his
cocaine addiction began to take its pernicious
hold. Like me, they were rather ambivalent
about that vice, understanding that Maradona
was not taking the white powder to boost his
extraordinary skills. Quite the opposite. “Drugs
made me a worse player, not a better one,” asMaradona had always argued. “Do you have any
idea the player I would have been if it weren’t
for the drugs?”
His club willingly protected him, even helping
to cover up his dope tests, but eventually
Maradona would be cut adrift by Napoli, and
his Mafia friends, as captured in Asif Kapadia’s
excellent documentary. A positive drug test
and a 15-month ban was the beginning of a
precipitous descent which would eventually
bring him close to death in 2004 for the first of
many round-the-clock vigils.
To understand the scale of devotion in
Argentina, I went to a gathering of members
of Iglesia Maradoniana — the Church of
Maradona — formed by his most fanatical fans.
The occasion was Maradona’s birthday, OctoberVigils from Buenos Aires to Naples
Argentina announced three days of national
mourning last night in honour of Diego
Maradona (Stephen Gibbs writes).
Murals that adorn thousands of town
squares across the country became makeshift
shrines, with fans leaving flowers and candles.
Scheduled programming was suspended on
most national TV and radio stations, as
commemorations of his life began. Newspapers
were preparing special editions. “Maradona is
dead. Now he is a legend” declared Clarín.
As night fell in the capital, Buenos Aires,
tens of thousands were heading for the historic
centre of the city to pay their respects. The
massive improvised wake looked set to be the
biggest outpouring of public grief in Argentina
since the death of Eva Perón in 1952.
In Naples, where Maradona played for seven
years from 1984 to 1991, fans lit flares and
gathered for vigils in front of the murals of him
on several buildings in the city.Outrageous and fearless –
Matt Dickinson – who met Maradona and many of
those close to him – pays tribute to perhaps the best
player who ever lived, certainly the most compelling