Never one to leave a pot unstirred, Diego Maradona has done it again. He may have been prompted by TV ratings, the knock-on effect of years of substance abuse or plain and simple hubris, but his reiteration that the “Hand of God” goal was illegal will again sharply divide the world into those who believe that he was a deeply flawed genius and those who feel genius is, anyway, by definition deeply flawed. For those who came in late, the aforementioned goal was the first of two he scored in the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup; the second, in which he waltzed past five England defenders and the goalkeeper, has been pretty unanimously called the greatest goal of all time.That match, of course, came with enough history to fill a museum. It was the first time the two countries were playing a football match since fighting the Falklands War of 1982, when England reclaimed the islands Argentina called Las Malvinas. In his autobiography El Diego, Maradona is pretty frank about how his team saw the match: “This was revenge, like recovering a little piece of the Malvinas. B*****cks was it just another match!” The English, having won the war, had little cause for revenge — and in any case lacked the wherewithal to extract it.No one who saw the match — either at Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium or on Doordarshan thousands of miles away — will forget either of those goals. Both wanted to make you rub your eyes in disbelief — and not just because it was the middle of the night! It was then that you knew the World Cup was headed for Buenos Aires. It had Maradona’s name written all over it.In truth, they showed up the two equally dominant traits in Maradona’s character, so contrasting he may well have been two different people (or at least a Gemini instead of a Scorpio). For every great goal, for every heart-stopping run, for every improbable dummy, there was a moment of extreme stupidity, unbelievable recklessness. Whether it was cars, or women or dope, the mud stuck. He has protested his innocence in all this as vehemently as he’s proclaimed the illegal nature of that goal, but it’s been more a case of crying wolf.That, though, is Maradona for you. The good comes with the bad, the great comes with the inexplicable. And he was among the greatest ever.
