Maradona — the man we hate to love, but secretly really want to.
June 1986. The fallout from the Chernobyl disaster continues. The UK and France announce plans to build a tunnel underneath the English Channel. The country is in the grip of a Thatcher government that is planning to deregulate the financial markets. Wham! have announced they’re splitting up.
I don’t care about any of this. It’s hot and sunny outside, and I’d normally be out playing. Instead, I’m lying belly first on the floor of our terraced house in the Midlands, transfixed by the small colour television that Dad recently bought. It’s not the TV itself that I’m gripped by, it’s what’s on it.
Mexico ’86. The World Cup. Giant stadiums, vast crowds and grass that is a vivid green. On this particular grass, there’s bright blue and white striped shirts moving around in the sweltering heat. But one of them is moving differently to everyone else. One of them is dancing. Maradona…..
Maradona has been something like a hero to me ever since that 1986 World Cup. I say something like a hero because he’s not a straightforward person to idolise. In fact, he polarises opinion (at least in the UK) and it’s fair to say that many people can’t stand him. What with the drugs, the womanising, the outlandish statements and the handball — of course, the handball — most people find him loathsome.
Most people are wrong though. I recently watched Asif Kapadia’s documentary (simply titled, ‘Maradona’). Kapadia’s previous credits include ’Senna’ and ‘Amy’, where his style is simply to display footage we’re unlikely to have seen before, depicting the subjects not just in their public, performance settings but also their private moments where their true character is more visible. Seeing the film reignited my fascination with Maradona but also showed a more complex side to him that explained a lot of what we see publicly.
My fondness for Maradona is inexplicable in many ways. As a lifelong football fan and amateur player, anyone who knows me knows that the qualities I hold in highest regard about the sport are at odds with what we perceive Diego Maradona to represent: graft, honesty, discipline, commitment. Most people would not refer to this list of attributes when talking about Diego Maradona.
Let us take another list of qualities: tactical astuteness, outlandish skill, leadership, verve and audacity. These are qualities that I, and most fans, love in football. This group of qualities is what Maradona was overflowing with, coupled with an incredibly fierce desire to win. Win every time, win everything, win at all costs. Yes, at all costs.
And let us take a third list of attributes: deceit, impudence, street guile, dark arts, mind games, bending the rules and getting away with it. These qualities, usually, are ones that most fans claim to detest. Particularly in the UK, as they fly in the face in our spirit of fairness and gentlemanly conduct. Bullshit I say. We’re happy to overlook these cherished principles when Lineker dives onto a Cameroonian leg to win a penalty, or when Shearer thrusts his elbow into an opponents face. Bullshit.
I say bullshit because I think, secretly, like a monk with guilty sexual desires, we love the qualities we claim to detest in Maradona. That snarling, devilish, roguishness applied to gain every advantage, every yard, every inch. We love that. Worse, we envy that and deny it to ourselves. This is a man who plays with his soul in full view, giving up everything he has in the pursuit of glory. He was just 25-years old in 1986, carrying the pressure of captaining his country with aplomb, singing terrace chants in the dressing room, shaking his fist in defiance and yet also, feeling the overwhelming attention that came with his fame. We wish we could conjure his emotion and show it so freely. Maradona is a pure expression of joy, pain, desire and hunger, a mirror to our own emotional suppression and unwillingness to do what it takes to win.
Let us go back to that first list of qualities: graft, honesty, discipline, commitment. Watch Kapadia’s documentary and revisit whether you feel Maradona lacked these qualities. Watching the film, or any other footage of Maradona, you see a player who relentlessly put his body on the line, never shirked from responsibility as either a player or captain, and was wholly dedicated to the cause.
In the UK he’s regarded as a cheat due to one thing — the deliberate handball against England in ’86. Yet watch him play for Barcelona or Napoli, and you’ll see a player subjected to lunging, brutal, and sometimes violent, tackles but make every attempt to stay on his feet — usually doing so due to a feat of his incredible balance. Watch the tackle from Goikoetxea (which earned him the nickname The Butcher of Bilbao), which left Maradona with a badly broken ankle and a lengthy period of pain and rehab. Many thought his best days were over after that tackle.
He went on to drag an unfancied and workmanlike Argentina side to World Cup glory in ’86 — the official FIFA film of that tournament, ‘Hero’, is built around this story (I almost wore out our VHS copy after watching on repeat daily). En route, he scored one of the best goals of all time. He then achieved an even more remarkable feat: taking provincial Napoli to the Serie A title not once but twice. To put this in perspective, this is akin to the modern day Wolverhampton Wanderers winning the Premier League twice. In a golden six-year period, he also led the team to Coppa Italia, UEFA Cup and Italian Supercup titles.
What came across most strongly in Kapadia’s documentary is the terrifying stardom into which a young boy from the Argentinian slums was thrust, unprepared and in a different continent from his home and family. Unlike today’s stars, access to Maradona was remarkable given the fanatical adulation he received. A regular feature of the film is Maradona’s furrowed, worried and grimacing face as he’s mauled by mobs of fans and chased by paparazzi. At these moments, it isn’t a cheating man-devil that we see, but a simple boy who just wants to play football. In his words, the only place he can find solace is on the pitch — the only place where everything else fades away.
In a recent interview, Kapadia said he came to like the complexity of the man — Diego, the boy from Buenos Aires; and Maradona the global football superstar. But unlike Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse, he didn’t find himself developing a deep fondness for his subject. Make no mistake, as a man he had deep flaws and his unsavoury connections with the Camorra crime families, drugs and womanising cannot be ignored. But if you expect perfectly clean heroes in any walk of life, you’re either in denial or setting yourself up for disappointment.
Me? Seeing Maradona as flawed human being whilst being reminded of his genius, only served to spark rose-tinted, soft-focus memories of that summer in ’86, watching Maradona conjure magic with a football and wondering how a man the size of a boy could also appear to have the stature of a giant.
