A nation weeps. A hero is dead. A flawed hero, but their hero: El Diego, D10S. As Argentina’s president Alberto Fernandez wrote on Twitter, without any hint of exaggeration, “Thank you for having existed, Diego. We will miss you all our lives.”
In his homeland, Diego Maradona – despite all his foibles and failures, despite the drugs and drink and accusations of domestic abuse – remained popular to a degree difficult to comprehend, worshipped as a deity. Three days of national mourning has been declared to mark his passing, but it will take far longer for this news to truly sink in. It was perhaps fitting that Maradona spent the last year of his life back close to where it began, managing Argentinian side Gimnasia y Esgrima de la Plata and lapping up the adoration on one last tour of the nation.
For too long, Maradona had led a peripatetic existence. The first five years of this century were spent in Cuba, supposedly trying to recover from his cocaine addiction after an overdose that nearly cost him his life.
Later, there were two spells in the United Arab Emirates, managing Al-Wasl and Al-Fujairah, before he popped up in Belarus in 2018 as president of Dinamo Brest. That was followed by a successful and ostensibly happy stint in northern Mexico, managing Dorados de Sinaloa, where his team only failed to achieve promotion at the very last.
In September 2019, though, with his age advancing and health deteriorating, home beckoned. He returned to Argentina to be announced as coach of Gimnasia, a modest first-division club from the city of La Plata, half an hour’s drive down the coast from the capital.
While Maradona’s coaching credentials were always questionable, the recruitment strategy was one devised with heart rather than head. Gimnasia were struggling in the league and needed a miracle to avoid relegation. Why would they not entrust their future to the Hand of God?
Maradona was greeted not only by 30,000 screaming Gimnasia fans at their ramshackle El Bosque stadium, but by most of Argentina’s 44 million people. Sports daily Olé immediately dedicated an entire section of its website to following Maradona’s every move and wherever Gimnasia went, their manager was received like a king.
For his first away trip, Maradona led his team to Rosario to face Newell’s Old Boys, for whom he played five games in 1993, naturally making him a bona fide club legend. Thousands of fans amassed outside his hotel, singing as he danced for them on the balcony.
At the stadium, he was met by a huge fan mosaic of his number 10 and provided with a custom-made throne, in which he sat like a decadent, bumptious renaissance ruler, watching his Gimnasia side romp to a 4-0 victory.
On other away trips, welcomes were similar. But the most fervent was left until last, when Gimnasia visited Boca Juniors in their famous Bombonera stadium on the last day of the season in early March.
Before the match, Maradona was serenaded with gusto and passion and got a fulsome kiss on the lips from Carlos Tevez, who went on to score the only goal of the game, winning Boca the league.
It was the last time Diego would walk out in front of a crowd at a stadium – the final tangible, visceral show of the nation’s love – and there was nowhere better for it to happen, waved off by his people with the last “Maradoooona, Maradoooona” ringing in his ears.
“Because I was away a long time, I sometimes asked myself if the people still loved me”, he said in an interview with Clarin earlier this year. The answer he received after his return to his homeland was emphatic.
In part, Maradona was cherished for the magic he performed on the field. As the great Argentinian manager Cesar Luis Menotti once said, “Diego doesn’t exist in a world that is not a pitch and a ball. That is his life and his dream.”
But even his level of genius cannot explain the extent and endurance of the adoration. As much as his football, Maradona was loved for what he represented. He was the poor boy from the barrios who had become the best in the world. Not only did he have the skill to score his second goal against England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final, he had the cunning and impudence to score the first.
Maradona’s was a life lived in the glare of the media. From 11, when his keepy-uppy skills were used as half-time entertainment at games, until those last few games with Gimnasia, he was making headlines. Consequently, Argentina saw it all – the magnificent, the terrible and the shameful. Diego’s life and soul were laid bare.
Rather than Maradona being idolised despite his indiscretions, he was to some degree idolised because of them. His genius made him god-like, but his failings made him human – and it was his humanity that made him loved.
Diego Maradona – (1960-2020)
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3o2SwMd
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