506 days.
That's how long it's been since I last felt compelled to write anything here.
It's probably down to the Pandemic and the absence of a Euro 2020 tournament. But nothing has inspired me to take to the keyboard in anger (or jest, love, sadness), nothing in the last topsy turvy 506 days. Nothing until now.
I recently stated on Twitter that Diego Maradona was my favourite footballer of all time, joint with Ronaldo, the real (Brazilian) one for you youngsters. But in my opinion he stands alone when ability is to be considered.
In this YouTube, FIFA Ultimate Team, Champions League, Premier League age so many are tempted into writing off what they has come before the present. That is largely because we have been blessed with two of the best footballers to have graced the modern game, with careers that have run in parallel and various cheerleaders from either side of the manufactured hyperbole that accompanies modern day football.
Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are, were, great but Maradona was something else.
To understand Diego's powers you first need to take yourself back and unlearn all of the last 40 or so years of football. For a start Napoli and Argentina were not the powerhouses they are now considered by many of the game's fans. The former have won Serie A only twice, under Diego's stewardship, and only really come close once since then a few years back powered by Maurizio Sarri and another Argentinian Gonzalo Higuian (King of the Bottlers).
Argentina, in spite of their record breaking success in the Copa America, had failed to amount to anything on the World stage at the point at which Maradona came to prominence. A berth in the very first World Cup final was followed by 48 years of abject failures, peaking with them watching the often lauded, technicolour, 1970 tournament at home, while their rivals from across the continent Brazil swept all before them.
Yes Diego didn't actually make the squad in 1978, much to the disgust of many, but it could be argued that the 17 year old, who had been playing in the domestic championship for the last two and a half years, had already started to have a positive influence on the nation in the grip of a military dictatorship.
Many Argentine detractors will probably point to the 78 tournament, held on their home patch, a question the Victor's legitimacy. A defeat in the first round, dodgy Peruvian performances with the hosts knowing how many goals were needed to make the final and sh*thosuery in the final against a Cruyffless Netherlands side help to make their case.
Enter Diego.
In 79 he tore the World Youth Cup a "new one" as Argentina swept all before them. In 82 he was supposed to carry them to glory but the then 21 year old Maradona was probably slightly too young to be able to influence a decent but hardly spectacular side that much (plus there was a lot going on off the field, the Faulklands and all that).
And then we have 1986. Mexico 86 will always be heralded as the peak of his career. Despite that what is often forgotten is how influential Diego was. We look at Champions, especially World Champions through the window, of hindsight. Almost assuming that their eventual victory was a given or a that they were "shoe-in" for the title. I feel like people are guilty of doing this with the 2002 Brazil side that lost embarrassingly to Honduras 12 months before the World Cup in Korea/Japan and the Italian side emerging from the Calciopoli scandal.
The same is done with Maradona's Argentina in 1986, we forget that they struggled in qualification, that there were questions over whether he should have been captain, that the press at home had been so scathing of the national team in the build-up to the tournament that the players made up insulting songs about them that they sung after victories in the later stages of the tournament.
We forget that Maradona, who was not a forward by any means, top scored for his country with 5 goals at least 3 of them being solo efforts most professionals would dream of scoring. That he eventually would go on to assist the winner in the final, despite being closely man-marked by West German great Lothar Matthaus for the entire game. We as English fans forget that we actually spent 90 minutes kicking lumps out of the guy, committing fouls that would probably nowadays see us ending the game with about 8 players. But of course, "(he) was the cheat".
And around that goal we often forget the baiting done by our press over the Faulklands war, the Faulklands being another legacy of out imperialist past that we don't want to properly acknowledge (I'm not going to get into that here, that's for Twitter! ;-)); and how that probably would have made it even less likely for the average Argentinian to feel too bad about The Hand of God (what the hell was Shilton doing though?!? How did he get out-jumped?).
I know one of the things we don't forget, that's his second goal. Dubbed "Goal of The Century", it may well have been the finest demonstration of power, speed, close control and composure, although you could argue that it was one of the best seen as he did it again against Belgium in the next game just to prove it was no fluke.
Mexico 86 is Diego Maradona, nobody has every before or since taken a major international tournament by the scruff of the neck like that, and nobody will.
Before this turns into a complete World Cup 1986 "love in", we should also go back and consider Diego's influence in club football. We often hear tired "Could he do it on a wet Wednesday night in Stoke/Burnley?", "Could [Insert World Class Foreign player] cope with the intensity of the Premier League clichés (one of these days I'll properly get into that); well Diego could.
He played on bogs, none of this Groundsman of the Year nonsense; against the best players and clubs in the World at the time; constantly being hacked like in the England game (just watch what my beloved Athletic do to him in 1983) with no protection from the referees; winning Serie A (twice) and the UEFA Cup, when it was a valued competition and there was no seeding to keep you away from the big boys until the later stages.
And all of this happened while he was off his head on cocaine (while the man definitely took drugs there was no evidence of them ever being the performance enhancing type, if anything they should have been performance reducing), being adored/harassed by fans of his club and country at a level many have never experienced (and that those who have have often struggled to cope with) and mixing with the Camorra.
So now there's his legacy. Diego is the sole reason the Argentine Number 10s are so revered. I'd go as far as saying he pioneered that role and inspired others to emulate him. The likes of Ortega, Aimar, Riquelme and Messi all have had a touch of Maradona in them. The Argentine national team is yet to win a major Men's international tournament since Diego's retirement and have only made the last four of the World Cup once (2014) in this time (they achieved this in 3 of the 5 tournaments during his career).
And Napoli have never quite hit the heights of those heady days in the later half of the 1980's. As previously stated there was one serious title challenge, were they managed to get 93 points yet still come second to Juventus; but barring a couple of Copa Italia's it's been a testing 30 or so years since the little man left Italy (under a cloud of unpaid taxes and a failed drug test, of course!).
All in all you have to say what a guy! To coin a phrase used by Barry Davies during the commentary on the Goal of The Century, "There is no debate about" the fact he should be considered the greatest to have played our beautiful game! Leo Messi isn't fit to lace his boots!*
PS he also played Italia 90 with a not fully healed, formerly broken ankle, taking painkillers before each match, the guy had some balls.
*Leo Messi is a wonderful footballer, one of the true greats of the game, this disrespect is purely for effect (but he will never be as good in my eyes).
