Diego Maradona Hand Goll : Obituary — Argentina’s flawed football icon

10 min readNov 26, 2020

Dazzling, infamous, extraordinary, genius, outrageous. Diego Maradona. A flawed football icon.

One of the game’s most gifted players, the Argentine boasted a rare combination of flair, flamboyance, vision and speed which mesmerised fans.

He also outraged supporters with his controversial ‘Hand of God’ goal and plunged into a mire of drug abuse and personal crises off the pitch.

Short and sweet — The football genius
Born 60 years ago in a Buenos Aires shanty town, Diego Armando Maradona escaped the poverty of his youth to become a football superstar considered by some to be even greater than Brazil’s Pele.

The Argentine, who scored 259 goals in 491 matches, pipped his South American rival in a poll to determine the greatest player of the 20th Century, before Fifa changed the voting rules so both players were honoured.

Maradona showed prodigious ability from a young age, leading Los Cebollitas youth team to a 136-game unbeaten streak and going on to make his international debut aged just 16 years and 120 days.

Short and stocky, at just 5ft 5in, he was not your typical athlete.

But his silky skills, agility, vision, ball control, dribbling and passing more than compensated for lack of pace and occasional weight problems.

He may have been a whizz at running rings round hostile defenders but he found it harder to dodge trouble.

Maradona’s 34 goals in 91 appearances for Argentina tell only part of the story of his rollercoaster international career.

He led his country to victory at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico and a place in the final four years later.

In the quarter-final of the earlier tournament, there was a foretaste of the controversy that would later engulf his life.

The match against England already had an extra friction, with the Falklands War between the two countries having taken place only four years beforehand. That on-field edge was to become even more intense.

With 51 minutes gone and the game goalless, Maradona jumped with opposing goalkeeper Peter Shilton and scored by punching the ball into the net.

He later said the goal came thanks to “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God”.

Four minutes later, he scored what has been described as the ‘goal of the century’ — collecting the ball in his own half before embarking on a bewitching, mazy run that left several players trailing before he rounded Shilton to score.
Maradona broke the world transfer record twice — leaving Boca Juniors in his home country for Spanish side Barcelona for £3m in 1982 and joining Italian club Napoli two years later for £5m.

There were more than 80,000 fans in the Stadio San Paolo when he arrived by helicopter. A new hero.

He played the best club football of his career in Italy, feted by supporters as he inspired the side to their first league titles in 1987 and 1990 and the Uefa Cup in 1989.

A party to celebrate the first triumph lasted five days with hundreds of thousands on the streets, but Maradona was suffocated by the attention and expectation.

“This is a great city but I can hardly breathe. I want to be free to walk around. I’m a lad like any other,” he said.

He became inextricably linked to the Camorra crime syndicate, dragged down by a cocaine addiction and embroiled in a paternity suit.

After losing 1–0 to Germany in the final of Italia 90, a positive dope test the following year triggered a 15-month ban.

He returned and arrested his slide, appearing to get his act together to play in the 1994 World Cup in the USA.

But he alarmed viewers with a maniacal full-face goal celebration into a camera and was withdrawn midway through the tournament after he was found to have taken the banned substance ephedrine.

Despite all this, Maradona was named manager of the Argentina national team in 2008 and took the side to the World Cup quarter-finals two years later before his reign ended with a 4–0 defeat by Germany in the quarter-finals.

Various managerial roles followed for a figure who continued to divide opinion, and continued to make headlines.

He needed reconstructive surgery on his lip after one of his pet shar pei dogs bit him, and publicly recognised his son Diego Armando Junior who was born from an extra-marital affair.

A snapshot of his chaotic lifestyle came when he attended Argentina’s match against Nigeria at the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

He unveiled a banner of himself, danced with a Nigeria fan, prayed to the heavens before the game, wildly celebrated Lionel Messi’s opener, fell asleep and gave a double middle finger salute after Argentina’s second goal.

A funeral home worker was fired after taking a picture of himself next to the open coffin of the late Diego Maradona, according to Mirror Sport.

Maradona, the Argentinian soccer legend, died Wednesday at the age of 60 after suffering a heart attack.

The worker was supposed to be preparing Maradona’s body for the wake, according the report. Instead he reportedly stopped to pose for a picture with a thumbs up next to the coffin. The English tabloid opted not to run the disturbing photo.

The owner of Sepelios Pinier funeral parlor in Buenos Aires told local media the employee had been fired.

Maradona’s death sparked tributes around the world for the former midfielder who led Argentina to a World Cup victory in 1986. He had recently undergone brain surgery to remove a blood clot but was released on Nov. 11.

He was ranked with Pelé among the best, and his ability to surprise and startle won over fans and even critics. But his excesses and addictions darkened his legacy.

Diego Maradona, the Argentine who became a national hero as one of soccer’s greatest players, performing with a roguish cunning and extravagant control while pursuing a personal life rife with drug and alcohol abuse and health problems, died on Wednesday in Tigre, Argentina, in Buenos Aires Province. He was 60.

His spokesman, Sebastián Sanchi, said the cause was a heart attack. Maradona had undergone brain surgery several weeks ago.

News of the death brought an outpouring of mourning and remembrance in Argentina, becoming virtually the sole topic of conversation. Such was his stature — in 2000, FIFA, soccer’s governing body, voted him and Pelé of Brazil the sport’s two greatest players — that the government declared three days of national mourning.

At Maradona’s feet, the ball seemed to obey his command like a pet. (He was said to do with an orange what others could only do with a ball.) And he played with a kind of brilliant camouflage, seeming to be somnolent for long stretches before asserting himself at urgent moments with a mesmerizing dribble, astounding pass or stabbing shot.

Wearing the traditional №10 jersey of a playmaker, Maradona led Argentina to soccer’s world championship in 1986, scoring one of the game’s most controversial goals and one of its most celebrated in the span of four minutes during the quarterfinals against England.

All the fame and infamy that attended his career and his life were on display in that quarterfinal match, on June 22, 1986, when Argentina faced England at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. Tension from the Falklands war between the two countries, four years earlier, still lingered.

Six minutes into the second half of a scoreless match, Maradona plunged into the English defense and slid a short pass to a teammate. The ball ended up on the foot of the English midfielder Steve Hodge, who looped a pass back toward his goalkeeper, Peter Shilton, only to see the predatory Maradona intercede. Though he was only 5 feet 5 inches tall, Maradona jumped high into the air and punched the ball into the net.

He did not use his head, as it first appeared, but rather his left fist, a maneuver not allowed by any soccer player but the goalkeeper. The Tunisian referee should have waved off the goal but, perhaps having not seen the offense, did not.

Maradona later gave conflicting accounts of what had happened. At first he said he had never touched the ball with his fist; then he said he had done so accidentally; then he attributed the goal to divine intervention, to “the hand of God.”

This infuriated the English.

“Brazen and shameless, Maradona was all mock innocence, talking about the ‘hand of God,’” Brian Glanville wrote in his book “The History of the World Cup.” “For England, rather, it was the hand of the devil.”

Four minutes later, Maradona scored again, eventually giving Argentina a 2–1 victory. His second goal came after a dribble of 70 yards through five English players and a final feint past Shilton to power the ball into an empty net. Deftly, he changed directions like a slalom skier slashing from one gate to another.

In the 1986 final, Maradona’s pass through the middle of the West German defense set up the winning goal in a 3–2 victory for Argentina. “No player in the history of the World Cup had ever dominated in the way Maradona ruled over Mexico-86,” Gardner wrote.

Maradona threatened to will his way through the 1990 World Cup — gathering a loose ball, feinting around a defender and passing through a thicket of legs to assist on the only goal in a quarterfinal win against Brazil. In the semifinals, against Italy, the host team, Maradona scored the penalty kick that put Argentina ahead as it won the shootout.

This was Maradona in his glory. The match was played in the raucous port city of Naples, where Maradona had played professionally and led Napoli to two titles in the Italian League. Audaciously, he had asked fans there to cheer for Argentina over Italy.

But there was no magic left for the 1990 final against West Germany. Maradona was bruised from being fouled repeatedly, and he lacked several prominent teammates, who had been suspended for committing flagrant fouls. Argentina lost, 1–0, on a penalty kick.

The Italians at Rome’s Olympic Stadium booed Maradona whenever he touched the ball. After all, he had eliminated Italy from the tournament. Afterward, he sourly charged that the penalty had been called as retaliation against Italy’s premature exit.

While Pele’s legend grew into international reverence, Maradona’s ability to surprise and startle developed a darker edge as he became addicted to cocaine during his playing days in the 1980s.

In 1991, he tested positive for cocaine while playing for Napoli and received a 15-month suspension. His behavior grew erratic. In February 1994, he fired an air rifle at reporters outside his summer home in Argentina.

Later that year he was thrown out of the World Cup, held in the United States, after testing positive for a cocktail of stimulants. Aging by then, he apparently needed an energy boost for his tired legs, or desperate assistance in losing weight.

His thick musculature having bloated into unhealthy corpulence, Maradona was hospitalized in Buenos Aires in April 2004 with what doctors described as a weakened heart and acute breathing problems. He then entered a psychiatric hospital there and, that September, left for further rehabilitation treatment in Havana.

His numerous health issues also included gastric bypass surgery to contain his weight and treatment for alcohol abuse. As a spectator at the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Maradona appeared to collapse and was treated by paramedics as Argentina secured a dramatic late victory over Nigeria to advance to the second round of the tournament.

Speaking to an Argentine television channel in 2014, he said, “Do you know the player I could have been if I hadn’t taken drugs?

He continued: “I am 53 going on 78 because my life hasn’t been normal. I’ve lived 80 with the life I’ve gone through.”

Such was the complexity of his personal life that, according to news accounts, he was the father of eight children, including two daughters with his wife at the time, Claudia Villafañe (they later divorced), and three children fathered while he was in Cuba undergoing treatment for his cocaine addiction.

His survivors include those daughters, Dalma and Gianinna, as well as three children from other relationships: Diego Armando Maradona Sinagra, an Italian soccer player; Jana Maradona; and Dieguito Fernando Maradona.

Continue reading the main story

Diego Armando Maradona was born Oct. 30, 1960, in Lanus, Argentina, and raised in the Buenos Aires shantytown Villa Fiorito, where he took up soccer on dusty streets with an urchin’s resourcefulness. By age 15 he had turned professional. (In his autobiography, he wrote that he had become so skilled a player as a youth that opposing coaches sometimes accused him of being an adult midget.)

He later starred with the European club powers Napoli and Barcelona and, in 2010, coached Argentina at the World Cup, held in South Africa, though his team suffered an embarrassing 4–0 loss to Germany in the quarterfinals.

He had a peripatetic coaching career, taking over club teams in Argentina, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico. In September, he was hired to coach the Argentine club Gimnasia y Esgrima in La Plata. On his 60th birthday, he attended his team’s match against Patronato, but left early in what became a 3–0 victory, prompting questions about his health.

When he entered a clinic in La Plata on Nov. 2, his doctor, Leopoldo Luque, said Maradona had been experiencing depression, anemia and dehydration. He then underwent brain surgery for a subdural hematoma, bleeding that collects in tissue surrounding the brain and that can be caused by a head injury. Dr. Luque told reporters that the injury was most likely sustained in an accident that Maradona could not remember.

His death left both Argentina and the wider world of soccer grief-stricken.

Pelé tweeted, “I lost a great friend and the world lost a legend.”

Napoli, his former Italian club team, said in a statement, “We feel like a boxer who has been knocked out.”

President Alberto Fernández of Argentina said of Maradona: “You took us to the top of the world. You made us immensely happy. You were the greatest of all.”

And Reuters recalled the words of Pablo Alabarces, a professor of popular culture at Buenos Aires University, who once described Maradona’s bringing the 1986 World Cup title to Argentina as a national palliative for a country reeling from economic crises and a humiliating defeat in 1982 in the Falklands War.

“In our collective imagination,” Alabarces said, “Diego Maradona represents a certain glorious past. He’s a symbol of what we might have been.

Diego Maradona Hand Goll : Obituary — Argentina’s flawed football icon

Written by Alamgir Bs