Maradona’s World Cup Story
By Jimmy Burns
With the World Cup in Qatar fast approaching this winter in the Northern hemisphere, one football legend will be missed, and notable by his absence , even for ever remembered, Diego Maradona who died two years ago on the 25th of November 2020.
During his tempestuous life and career, Maradona played for top clubs in South America and Europe-including Boca Juniors, FC Barcelona and most notably Napoli where he became an adored hero and adopted son. He was the Player of the 20th Century in 2000 after a large public popular vote via the internet , a unanimous recognition for his exceptional talent.
He grew to be elevated among the pantheon of player Gods in his homeland of Argentina after leading them to victory in the 1986 World Cup, and his personality loomed large in other editions of the world’s pre-eminent football tournament.
Anyone doubting that Maradona was more than just a football player had only to witness the outpourings of grief and tributes that followed news that he had died from cardiac arrest, aged 60 , bringing to an end the life of a flawed genius, who had struggled with ill-heath aggravated by drugs abuse.
Maradona’s World Cup story began in 1978 when despite already gaining a reputation as an exceptional young talent, aged 17 and soon to turn 18, he was told that he would not play for his country weeks away from it hosting the tournament.
Maradona was born in a Buenos Aires slum and discovered by a scout who was captivated by the sight of his unique skill and potential, a standout star among a group of rough and hungry boys. He was only fifteen when he played his first League professional match for Argentina Juniors, the youngest player to do so in the history of his country’s topflight football in October 1976. Within a year he had sufficiently impressed the new coach of the Argentine national team Cesar Menotti to be included in a preliminary squad in early matches ahead of the World Cup.
A friendly match against Hungary in Buenos Aires’s Boca Juniors Bombonera stadium, had thousands of local fans chorusing Maradona’s name after Menotti had brought on the player, twenty minutes into the second after the visitors had scored their first goal after trailing 0-4. The young Maradona made his presence felt from the outset, launching a series of attacking moves from deep inside his own half, manoeuvring through the Hungarian defence support and narrowly missing a goal just five minutes from the end of the game which would have sealed Argentina’s victory at 5-1. He finished nonetheless as the player of the match, hugged by his colleagues, and cheered by the crowd.
He became increasingly popular with Argentine fans, and the focus of growing media attention. Among the Argentine sports journalist taking a keen interest in him at the time was Ezequiel Fernandez Moores who believed that Maradona’s reputation was already of such a nature as to eclipse most of the rival candidates for the team expected to play in the World Cup in 1978.
As Moores told me when I was researching The Hand of God my biography of the player : ‘The only thing that really interested us in the sporting media was Maradona. We were waiting for him to play, to see if he could really prove himself at an international level. He was among the players that Menotti gathered around him at a special training camp outside Buenos Aires before he made his final decision. I remember how intense those days were.’
Then the day came when Menotti told Maradona that he had not, after all, picked him for the final twenty-two that would compete for the World Cup championship finals. It was a devastating blow for Maradona, but one that Menotti claimed would best serve his country and the longer-term career prospects of the player.
As Menotti told me, he believed that Maradona was still not mature enough, both physically and emotionally, to deal with the pressures of playing not just for his host county but in a tournament in which Argentina faced tough competition and was surrounded by controversy because of the human rights violations committed by the country’s ruling military junta .
Doctors had told Menotti that the teenager Maradona’s muscular structure was still in the process of development and that he risked suffering a bad foul and being crippled for the rest of his career by it.
It was a fact that Menotti’s favourite player at the time was not Maradona but Mario Kempes whose reputation as a prolific goal scorer had been growing since moving to the Spanish club, Valencia. Kempes ,at the age of 23, would go on to be the 1978 World Cup top scorer, scoring twice in the final in which Argentina beat Holland 3-1.
It was Maradona not Kempes that was destined to be considered the greater player of the two. The depression that gripped the immature Maradona following his exclusion from Menotti’s Word Cup winning team proved short lived.
With the extraordinary will power that was to rescue him time and time again throughout his career, Maradona put the disappointment behind him and set his sights instead on proving that he could achieve the success on the playing field that had been marked out for him since childhood.
Watched closely and encouraged by Menotti who brought him back into the national team, Maradona was outstanding in a game against Scotland at Hampden Park in June 1979, contributing to Argentina 3-1 victory with a goal that had British commentators describing him as Pele’s natural successor at the top of world football. Maradona whipped the ball into the net after beating three Scottish players with a series of feints and dummies in a match that showed him strong, brave and skilful, and an inspiration to his team.
Soon afterwards Maradona captained Argentina under 21’s to their first World Youth Championship cup in Tokyo and was impressing Menotti so much that in an interview the national coach said this as to how it felt watching the player when he was in playing at his best on the field: “It is like a classical music fanatic alone in a private room with a symphony orchestra performing Beethoven just for you.’
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Four days before the start of the 1982 World Cup in Spain in June 1982, Maradona pulled a hamstring during a training session. The thought that Maradona might not be fit, and that defending champions Argentina might start without their star player threw Menotti and his squad into a state of crisis.
It proved a false alarm, as Maradona got over his injury through sheer will power and some additional psychological encouragement from Menotti and the team doctor Ruben Oliva . Mistrusted by fellow doctors, Oliva was held in awe by his patients , not least by Maradona who looked upon him less as a scientist than as a magical healer . As Menotti told me, Maradona had one place where he felt motivated enough to confront the world and conquer it, and that was playing football. Take a ball away from Maradona and it was taking a Colt .45 away from a cowboy. He felt naked.
On the eve of Argentina’s opening World Cup tie with Belgium, Maradona was declared fit. On paper, Argentina remained one of the strongest teams with all eyes of the football world on Maradona, described at the time by British journalist Brian Glanville, as ‘twenty-one years old, thick-thighed, enormously quick in thought and movement, a super finisher and a fine tactician.’
Argentina did not get off to a good start, losing their first game 0-1. But they next beat Hungary 4-1 with Maradona very much the man of the match, and also helping the team progress into the next round after beating El Salvador.
Then Argentina seemed to lose its way, beaten by Italy before being knocked out of the tournament by Brazil in a bruising and humiliating encounter. Maradona was reduced from stardom to a red card , sent off five minutes from the end for a blatant foul on the Brazilian half-back Batista.
Maradona nonetheless seemed to personify the self-confident hubris of his nation as its military surrendered at the end of the war over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.
In Spain, Maradona was unable to count on the support which the military had manipulated in favour of the national squad and he became the focus of attention of the media for all the wrong reasons. The Spanish media focused on how Maradona and his extended family of relatives and hangers-on became part of an indulgent lifestyle, eating and drinking in excess and the player hardly training.
Maradona’s state of mind was in the end undermined by the crude tactics of his opponents, not least by that of the Italian defender Claudio Gentile by whom he was continually fouled without the referee taking any action
Maradona fuelled controversy on the pitch as much as he did off it. However his reputation for being, on a good day, a better player than anyone else on the planet, had him signed iin the summer of 1982 by FC Barcelona, in one of the biggest transfer deals yet seen in football, worth US dollars 7.3 million.
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Whatever public doubts have surrounded the career of Diego Maradona, there has always been virtual unanimity that it was in the World Cup in Mexico in 1986, that he showed his real greatness on the field, the stand-out player of the tournament, who single-handedly inspired and led Argentina to conquer the tournament for the second time in the nation’s history.
Maradona’s personal achievement was to play sublime football despite the growing turbulence of his personal life . His demons included fathering an illegitimate child he would take years to recognise and taking cocaine for the first time in Barcelona in a developing habit that would haunt him in Spain, in Italy , after he had transferred from Barcelona to Napoli, and in his birthplace Buenos Aires where he was arrested for cocaine possession.
There is no evidence that Maradona took illegal substances knowingly to enhance his performance during the Mexico World Cup. I was told by one Fifa insider that he was tested three times during the competition, but the results were all negative and were never publicised.
In fact, Maradona showed he had matured as a player since the previous World Cup in Spain, as a result of playing in European club football first with FC Barcelona and then Napoli . The tournament showed the flourishing of Maradona’s genius on the field, enlivened by drama on and off the field.
The quarter final Argentina played against England had a particular emotional charge, with Maradona seeing his role as that of avenging the death and defeat of his countrymen in Falklands War .
The first goal of the match , five minutes into the second half , involved Maradona rising to meet the English goalkeeper Shilton, and punching the ball into the net, scoring what the English would for ever claim was a handball, but which the referee and linesman allowed as a goal after it was celebrated as such by Argentine players and fans.
Four minutes later no one argued about the brilliance of Maradona’s second goal which to his day endures as one of the best ever scored . Picking up the ball inside his own half, Maradona carved his way through the English mid-field and defence with the effortless movement of a racing skier in slalom. As Maradona himself later recalled, he felt a big urge to go on running with the ball. He certainly was able to leave everyone behind, even his own teammates who looked on as if they were looking at a piece of movie tailor made for one starring performance, and realising that they had no part to play in the creation of a goal that could never have been rehearsed but drew from the deep inner resources of a huge talent of the game.
In the words of the eminent World Cup chronicler Brian Glanville, it was a goal ‘so unusual, almost romantic, that it might have been scored by some schoolboy hero, or some remote Corinthian, from the days when dribbling was the vogue. It hardly belonged to so apparently rational and rationalized an era as ours, a period in football when the dribbler seemed as extinct as the pterodactyl.’
Neither in the immediate aftermath of Emgland’s defeat , nor in the years that followed did Maradona ever admit to the folly of the first goal. He called the goal the hand of God. By that he meant not that he didn’t use his hand, but that he did, and got away with it, with God’s blessing, fuelling a claim of divine intervention of the kind that seemed to help him deal with adversity from his early days as the urchin child living in the shanty.
The second goal, which I never tire of watching, shows Maradona as a hugely gifted player of exceptional skills whose combination of acceleration, control, strength and accuracy translated into unrivalled greatness on the field.
Argentina’s 3-2 victory over West Germany in the final involved Maradona in a gladiatorial contest with the German midfielder Lothar Matthaus, the sheer skill and self-discipline of the former ultimately overcoming the rough and relentless marking of the latter.
Maradona emerged from Mexico World Cup 1986 as the undisputed star , not just of his own team , but of the whole tournament.
As noted by one the greatest ever sportswriters
the late Hugh McIllvanney, never before in more than half a century of World Cups had the talent of a single footballer loomed so pervasively over everybody’s thinking.
As McIllvanney wrote in an article he penned at the time for the English newspaper the Observer, Maradona’s impact went far beyond the simple realisation that he was indisputably the best and most exciting player at work in the game. It was inseparable from the conviction of his vast public following that had chosen Mexico’s Aztec stadium as the setting for the definitive statement of his genius.
It was in Mexico that Maradona also channelled his inner tensions into a positive combativeness. He criticised the football authorities for forcing football players to play their matches under a scorching midday sun simply to suit the coverage times judged most commercially viable for the worldwide TV rights. In doing so, Maradona clearly did not consider his own contribution to the evolving , highly lucrative business of football, by becoming a worldwide icon of the game.
If the Mexican wave was born in the Azteca stadium, bringing back joy in the aftermath of a major earthquake, it was Maradona who had ridden the crest of it, thanks to his magic in the field.
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The World Cup of Italia ’90 will be remembered as the competition of tears. They were shed before millions of TV viewers as Pavarotti sang Nessum Dorma at the opening concert, and by Maradona at the end of the final where Argentina lost to to West Germany .
Maradona was jeered and whistled throughout the match by the largely Italian crowd after the Argentine anthem had been booed, prompting the then Napoli player to swear in front of the cameras : ‘Sons of Bitches’, he mumbled, his words inaudible but easily lip read.
Four years after the glory of Mexico, Maradona appeared condemned to a downward spiral- his final days at Napoli destined to be overshadowed by allegations of links with the local criminal organisation La Camorra , drug abuse, and sexual orgies.
During Italia ’90 Maradona only once managed to replicate the magic on the field he had shown in Mexico four years before. In Argentina’s earlier round match against Brazil, played in Turin, eight minutes from the final whistle when the two sides were level at 0-0, Maradona effortlessly manoeuvred through Brazil’s sweeper system, before setting up the winning goal for his friend Claudio Caniggia.
But Maradona ended Italia ‘90 as it he had begun, being jeered and whistled, angering a majority of Italia fans, by urging those from Napoli to support him rather than the Italian national team when Argentina played and won against Italy in the semi-finals. It was a sign that something had cracked in Maradona’s Italian experience, and there was much worse to come.
Four years later Maradona was expelled from World Cup USA ’94 after testing positive for drugs that were on FIFA’s proscribed list of performance-enhancing substances. Maradona denied that he had defied regulations by knowingly takings drugs to aid his activity in the field. However, as it later emerged, prior to Argentina second game of the tournament, against Nigeria, he had taken a ‘cocktail’ of decongestant and weight-control drugs that contained banned substances.
Maradona’s expulsion proved hugely controversial and overshadowed the early stages of an otherwise commercially hugely successful World Cup. The game against Nigeria turned out to be the last World Cup game he ever played for Argentina in , with Maradona physical and mental health going into free fall , with occasional brief revivals, in his final years.
His return to the Argentine squad as its coach in the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, with what some of his fans hoped would prove the dream partnership with his star player Messi in the team, ended in failure when Argentina lost 4-0 to Germany in the quarter finals. The outcome left Argentine football with a sense of humiliation as well as loss. It showed Messi still unable to replicate Maradona’s achievement of winning a World Cup, while exposing Maradona’s shortcomings as a national coach.
The last time Maradona was present at a World Cup was in Russia in 2018. For a short while he drew the attention of the media , cutting a somewhat grotesque figure-bloated face, puffy eyes, and gesturing wildly- as he watched Argentina knocked out of the tournament from a stadium balcony seat. Millions of TV views caught sight of Maradona’s theatrical rage, from rolling eyes to abusive two fingers, seemingly out of his head on something, less a noble Caesar that a decadent Caligula believing he could still preside over football’s equivalent of the Roman circus.
After Maradona’s tragic decline and death, what endures is the memory of those moments of joy in his best playing years during a career cut short by the demons he carried within himself.
He remains the measure by which many fans still judge Lionel Messi who will play in Qatar knowing that the age of 35 it will almost certainly be his last chance to win the World Cup that has always eluded him. No doubt if Maradona was still alive, he would have been drawn into further controversy, perhaps critical of the World Cup being held at all in Qatar and always ready to cause a storm with his outspoken views about the questionable politics and business of football. ENDS
