On Wednesday, Diego Maradona died. He was one the greatest footballers ever, but in England we are understandably preoccupied with the goal he scored against us in the 1986 World Cup. A handball, the infamous Hand of God.
I was born in 1983, so in 1986 I was only three and not old enough to have witnessed the match between Argentina and England. But I seem always to have known who Maradona is. Even by, let’s say age nine, six years later, when I was first trying to play football on the school playground, you couldn’t make a handball without shouts of “Maradona!”
I didn’t get to make many handballs because I couldn’t really get anywhere near the ball. Later on, I much preferred rugby because at that age you could be quite successful just by running into people. Rugby at secondary school was more difficult. I was the lowest scoring winger in the school’s history, owing to not being able to catch.
I had no idea Maradona was such a good footballer. If you watch videos on YouTube, you’ll see that at times he was unstoppable - the other players just can’t get the ball off him. But for me, until very recently, all I knew was his reputation for that handball. You probably know, he punched the ball into the net. In the night on Wednesday, one of my cats punched me in the head. I say, “my cats,” but they came with my wife. Cats are supposed to relieve stress - probably because they don’t give a shit about anything - but another thing to wake me up in the middle of the night just doesn’t help. Bobby had got shut in the bedroom and by 4am she clearly really needed to be let out. I have been scratched, clawed and kneaded by a cat, but never punched.
I think if you could ask Bobby, she wouldn’t want a reputation for punching people. But you can’t talk to a cat, and anyway a cat is quite unable to conceive of the notion of reputation. If a tree falls in the wood, we are concerned with whether or not word can get around that it’s fallen. But really, if the tree can’t know its notoriety, does it exist?
I digress. I heard an interview on Wednesday with a sports journalist in Argentina. She had met Maradona on a number of occasions - but, she said, she didn’t think she really knew him. The difficulty was that he had been in the public eye throughout his entire life. He was doing keepy-uppies on TV aged 8. Even at supposedly private, family and friends only gatherings, there was always someone there filming him, or from the press.
So in a way, Maradona was pure reputation, perhaps even to himself. He faced a lot of difficulty off the pitch, with drug and alcohol abuse, and with his health, and it sadly interfered with his ability to play football. It’s hard to say what might have helped him, if anything. But I can’t help noting, there’s no evidence that he lived with a cat.
Have a good weekend