This is sad. Maradona was a distinct part of my childhood growing up in Eastern Europe where soccer heroes were practically worshipped. Following Pelé, of course. A trip down memory lane... RiP. His best goals (according to YT): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XegYZ8y3xMY&ab_channel=FIFAT...
to see how legendary this man was, you just have to watch Maradona, the HBO documentary. which is also arguably one of the best sports documentaries. He was a polarizing figure no doubt, but this man won Argentina the world cup single-handed. ahh see the pun. he also made napoli a backwater team into the powerhouse it is today. n remember most of the matches he won, he was high on coke i.e not playing at his full pot…
I saw him live in Foxboro MA in the 1994 world cup match vs Greece (before he was disqualified for drug use). The crowd reaction to him was amazing. Every time he ran near the section I was in the crowd would go crazy just because he was close, even if the ball was far away. It was an amazing experience.
I’m from Argentina, this is a big deal for us. But I’d have never expected to see it in the front page of HN.
And I also didn't expect everyone abroad to respect Diego so much in this day and age. I think with his passing I'm getting to experience something that my generation has never experienced before, which is a glimpse into how the international community respects a part of Argentinian culture that is not grilled meat or Patagonia. My heart is also kinda warmed by the fact he left us the same day Fidel did.
Maybe it’s because I’m Italian, but Patagonia and grilled meat are honestly the last things I think about when I think Argentina, probably because I’ve sadly not been there yet. To me your country looks like long-haired footballers, Borges, Soriano, tango, Buenos Aires, desaparecidos, a president who looked like the guy on Fantasy Island (Menem), and all those magnificent comicbook artists the country somehow produced (Quino, Josè Munoz, Carlos Sampayo, Horacio Altuna, Alberto Salinas, Lucho Olivera, the “adopted” Robin Wood...). It’s still very much a stereotype, but definitely something I can’t really associate to wilderness.
I can’t see how this isn’t celebrating dishonesty and unsportsmanship - both things that undermine sport not make it.
You are missing the point. Football is not just a sport. It is not made of cold analysis and rules. As Sartre said: Il calcio è una metafora della vita. Football is a metaphor of life, it is arduous, hard, difficult, full of suffering with redeeming glory. Miracles are possible, and there is always time.
I'm not sure why Sartre is quoted in Italian here, but this seems to be a spurious quote all the same. I could only find two sources with a version of that quote in French and neither had a citation of the original source. In fact, the only real quote from him I could find on soccer was «Au football, tout est compliqué par la présence de l'équipe adverse» ("In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.").
Interestingly, during my search I found an apt quote for this discussion from another 20th century French philosopher. Camus once said «Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois» ("What I know about morality, I owe to football"). I guess he would be missing the point here too.
It's possible that he was sort of a big deal? Just something to consider next time you are thrown for a loop while scrolling to find the latest Python news.
> It's possible that he was sort of a big deal? Where? I've never heard of him.
Hey, as you go on posting irrelevant variations of this, I'm just curious: how old are you? Are you aware that the World existed before the Internet or the year 2000 and that this guy happened to be the best player in the most popular sport in the World who also scored a goal that was considered pretty much impossible until ten years later a dude called Ronaldo (the original one) scored something like it against a much weaker team in a national league, not in a World Cup, a global event that happens to draw pretty much the same viewership than the Olympics?
So yeah, outside your own limited experience Maradona was a huge deal.
Never a big fan myself though yet dep, barrilete cósmico and hugs to all the Argentinian folks, it's difficult to convey why and how much they feel what they do about this flawed individual, but they do.
> n remember most of the matches he won, he was high on coke i.e not playing at his full potential. That's a big assumption. I bet without coke he wouldn't have dared to do his hand of god act.
You clearly lack the political context of England/UK and Argentina, and what that goal represented to Argentinians. With or without coke, that was a moment of liberation, and he alone carried the Argentinean team on his shoulders in 1986 when they won the World Cup. One needs more than coke to do what he did in 1986. One needs to be extraordinarily gifted, only for the likes of Pele, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Garrincha, M…
It was more a feeling of revenge than liberation. In 1982 my family and the entire country was at war with an Argentinean dictator, when suddenly Margaret Tatcher, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, instead of de-escalating the situation with the Argentine dictator decided to go to war with a country that was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, Argentine people felt betrayed by England. Both countries were close friends for more than 100 years, since 1810 when Britain and Argentina signed a treaty of friendship proposed by Woodbine Parish. His cousin, John P. Robertson, was a good friend of General San Martin. Argentina and England had 2 enemies in common: Spain and France. Both countries were allies until the beginning of world war 2, when General Perón became a good friend of Mussolini. The dictators and facists Videla a Galtieri went to war with the UK, US and NATO. In 1982 there was no democracy in Argentina, and no diplomats to stop the war. There was no Congress and Senate at that time, making the war illegal. The fact that Maradona scored an "illegal" goal against England was seen as a revenge for loosing a war that no one wanted to fight. No one except Tatcher.
to see how legendary this man was, you just have to watch Maradona, the HBO documentary. which is also arguably one of the best sports documentaries. He was a polarizing figure no doubt, but this man won Argentina the world cup single-handed. ahh see the pun. he also made napoli a backwater team into the powerhouse it is today. n remember most of the matches he won, he was high on coke i.e not playing at his full pot…
> n remember most of the matches he won, he was high on coke i.e not playing at his full potential. That's a big assumption. I bet without coke he wouldn't have dared to do his hand of god act.
He would have been even more outrageous without coke. He said as much on camera: on the pitch he was fine, “beyond the midfield line I was the commander in chief”; it was off the pitch that he struggled and needed coke. He started sniffing in Barcelona, where he didn’t gel with the team off the pitch and probably felt lonely and restless, but his football was already fantastic. Without the addiction he would have had a longer career, and likely would have carried Argentina in ‘94 too.
I hated his guts as a kid because of 1990 (another hand of god, and the feeling he took from Baggio and Schillaci’s Italy a final that was our god-given right), but I’ve come to realize later that he was one of the last great footballers to be (flawed) men first and athletes second. The way he spoke of guilt and regret, his embarrassingly public mistakes... they made him more real than a robotic superman like Cristiano Ronaldo will ever be. And some of his highlight reels are ridiculous.
Pelé is definitely the choice of many pundits, but he played most of his club soccer in the Brazilian leagues. In Brazil's World Cup efforts he had a superb team around him. Maradona is given the nod because he played in Spain and Italy, in addition to Argentina, and dominated a World Cup with a much weaker team.
I am Brazilian(and a major football/Pelé fan), so heavily biased here. And I don't see the competitiveness of leagues/or time holding up as an argument. Pelé dominated his competition for a long time, he won national and continental championships multiple times as well as being the star in two world cups, one of them at the age of 17, his numbers are better as well. Maradona in the meantime spent a solid amount of ti…
Great response! Pelé coming to the US was a HUGE kick start to soccer in this country and I will never forget him kicking a ball with President Gerald Ford at the White House.
You are probably right about the other players that you mentioned as well, and given some distance from their remarkable achievements we will absolutely see them in even higher regard than we already do.
That said, "Pelé: Birth of a Legend" is just a terrible movie... but I am trying not to hold that against him.
Can someone explain to a soccer novice why this goal is special? It looks similar to lots of others to my untrained eye.
So the importance of this goal was that Maradona dribbled pas almost the whole England team single highhandedly and humiliated them, restoring the pride of a nation (Argentina) who lost a war (Falklands War) before this to England.
Argentina did not loose the war, that's what Brits don't understand, a facist dictator lost the war. You see, in 1982 my family and the entire country was at war with an Argentinean dictator, when suddenly Margaret Tatcher, an unpopular Prime Minister at that time, saw the opportunity and instead of de-escalating the tension between UK and the dictator, she decided to go to war with him. What the media didn't tell the Brits is that Argentina was already at war and fighting for democracy. For that reason, Argentine people felt betrayed by England. Both countries were close friends for more than 100 years, since 1810 when Britain and Argentina signed a treaty of friendship proposed by Woodbine Parish. His cousin, John P. Robertson, was a good friend of General San Martin. Argentina and England had 2 enemies in common: Spain and France. Both countries were allies until the beginning of world war 2, when General Perón became a good friend of Mussolini. The dictators and facists Videla a Galtieri went to war with the UK, US and NATO. There was no democracy in Argentina, no government and diplomats to stop the war. It was an illegal war because it was not approved by the Congress and Senate. The fact that Maradona scored an "illegal" goal against the Brits was seen as a revenge for loosing a war that no one wanted to fight, except for Tatcher.