A troubled genius

Diego Maradona, one of foot­ball’s icons and a man who it can be truly said lived life to the full, died on No­vem­ber 25. As a player, among other clubs he graced Barcelona (1982-84) and Napoli (1984-91) with his foot­balling skills, be­fore mostly un­re­mark­able spells as coach of sev­eral clubs and even the Ar­gen­tine na­tional team. He had a Church named after him in his na­tive land, by which I do not mean a phys­i­cal build­ing, but a re­li­gious move­ment. But that was in Ar­gentina. In Eng­land, the name Maradona used to in­stil great rage in peo­ple, and I admit I was one of them. Why? Be­cause of the “Hand of God”, of course. The only way that par­tic­u­lar foot­balling in­jus­tice could have been made any worse would have been to some­how as­so­ci­ate it with the work of God. And that’s ex­actly what he did. That made my and many of my com­pa­tri­ots’ blood boil at the time, and for years af­ter­wards. But that was long ago. Things have changed since then, and this leg­end of the game leaves be­hind an un­par­al­lelled legacy.

There is no ques­tion that he was a foot­balling ge­nius, and al­though most fans still de­bate whether he or Pele was bet­ter, it is re­veal­ing to know that many put him above a player whose bril­liance we are wit­ness­ing in this era: Li­onel Messi. That should tell the mod­ern gen­er­a­tion just how good Maradona was. His stats are an­other clue: he scored 38 goals in 58 ap­pear­ances with Barça, while aside from lead­ing Ar­gentina to World Cup suc­cess, he scored 34 goals in 91 ap­pear­ances at all lev­els for his coun­try. His great­est feat, how­ever, was surely to help Napoli win the Ital­ian Serie A not once but twice, in­clud­ing a league and cup dou­ble, and then a UEFA Cup. Lo­cals say that his time in Naples com­pletely changed the morale of a city where he is still revered to this day.

Hail­ing from hum­ble be­gin­nings, Maradona strug­gled with the fame that en­gulfed him, and turned to drugs to deal with his demons and the emo­tional pres­sures of just being who he was. Drugs of course lead to so­cial and health is­sues, and Maradona’s are well-doc­u­mented. It is far more ap­pro­pri­ate here to pay tes­ta­ment to just what he gave to the world. He played foot­ball like no one else, bring­ing joy to mil­lions, and as a foot­ball-lov­ing Eng­lish­man, de­spite the ini­tial neg­a­tive emo­tions he in­spired in me as a young man, I came to re­alise that the big­ger pic­ture was what he was able to do on a foot­ball field... his dance around half the Eng­land team in 1986 was an ex­pres­sion of ge­nius that far out­weighed his de­ceit in that game. In­deed, the act of “cun­ning” in­spired by God was his re­sponse to an­other form of cheat­ing that he reg­u­larly faced – op­po­si­tion play­ers try­ing to kick him off the pitch. And Eng­land cer­tainly did that in Mex­ico, it’s just that the lit­tle man would get back up, dust him­self down, and do what he did best. Eng­land’s ef­forts to stop him were an ad­mis­sion that they just could not live with him on a foot­balling level.

There are also many sto­ries of Maradona’s great hu­man­ity and com­pas­sion, es­pe­cially with chil­dren... this was a man who knew what it was like to feel hurt and pain and the need for other human be­ings’ sup­port to over­come it. Above all else, I be­lieve he rep­re­sented what a human being can achieve in the face of ad­ver­sity. Now his tur­bu­lent life is over, I’m sure he will fi­nally be at peace.