00:00There was an afternoon in Mexico when Diego Armando Maradona was, at the same time, God and man.
00:06The greatest and the most deceitful, the hero and the rogue, all in 45 minutes, all against England.
00:14It was June 22, 1986, in the quarter-finals of the World Cup.
00:19That match, the day that changed history, remains forever in the memory of football fans.
00:25Four years earlier, Argentina and the United Kingdom had fought a war over the Falkland Islands.
00:32A real war with more than 900 dead.
00:36Hundreds of Argentine soldiers who never returned.
00:39The British Empire, at the height of its military power, had subdued the South Americans on the battlefield.
00:46In real life, Argentina had no chance against England.
00:51But this was football.
00:53And in football, blood is not divine, talent is not inherited by lineage.
00:58And that afternoon, at the Azteca Stadium, Diego Armando Maradona showed the world that kings don't come alone
01:05of the gods.
01:06The pasture makes them.
01:07First came the handball, a disguised punch that the referee didn't see and that Maradona celebrated without guilt.
01:14Later, when asked, he said it had been partly with his head and partly with his hand.
01:21God.
01:21The trap elevated to theology.
01:24The mischievousness of the kid from Villafiorito, turned into mythology.
01:29However, minutes later came the other goal.
01:33The one who didn't need cheating in theology.
01:36Maradona received the ball in his own half.
01:39He turned around and started running.
01:40He went to one, he went to another.
01:42He beat 3, 4, 5 English players who tried to stop him and couldn't.
01:48He covered 70 meters in 10 seconds and scored alone against the goalkeeper.
01:54It was the goal of the century, and he didn't say so himself, the whole world voted for it.
01:59In that match, in those two goals, all of Maradona was present.
02:03Genius and deception.
02:05The divine and the human.
02:07The being who could do what no one else could.
02:10But, at the same time, a being deeply marked by mistakes.
02:16Diego Armando Maradona grew up in 1960 in Villafiorito, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
02:22It was a poor neighborhood with makeshift courts.
02:25There was nothing there that foreshadowed a king.
02:28But, ever since he was a child, the ball obeyed him in a way that had never been seen before.
02:34nobody.
02:34At age 10, he appeared on television, doing tricks during a program.
02:40People couldn't believe what they were seeing.
02:43With that promise on his shoulders, he arrived at Argentinos Juniors.
02:47Then to Boca.
02:48And then, to the world.
02:50First to Barcelona, where injuries and hepatitis slowed his rise.
02:54But then he arrived in Naples.
02:56And there, in Italy, Maradona became an earthly god.
03:01Naples was a club from southern Italy.
03:04Poor, historically humiliated by northern clubs.
03:07With Maradona he won two Scudettos, a UEFA Cup and an Italian Cup.
03:12The entire city worshipped him as a deity.
03:15They put murals on the walls.
03:17They prayed to him.
03:18They asked him for miracles.
03:19And he, who came from humble beginnings like them, understood that love and returned it multiplied on the field.
03:28But outside of it, Maradona began to lose himself.
03:32Cocaine entered his life during those glory years.
03:35Parties, excesses, and bad company.
03:39His links to the Neapolitan Camorra were documented and never fully clarified.
03:44Maradona lived with the same intensity with which he played.
03:48And that intensity led him to places he shouldn't have gone.
03:52He was the hero the people raised up, but also the man who didn't always know how to carry that weight.
03:59He arrived at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico as the best player in the world.
04:03And he confirmed it game after game.
04:06Argentina moved forward with him as the driving force, as the captain, as the soul.
04:10When the quarter-finals against England arrived, Maradona turned it into something more than just a football match.
04:18Let's win for the Argentinians, for the boys of the Falklands.
04:22Legend has it that he told his companions before going out onto the field.
04:27They won, and history was forever etched in our memories.
04:30Argentina moved forward.
04:32In the semi-finals, they eliminated Belgium with two goals from Maradona.
04:36Both extraordinary.
04:37In the final, West Germany pushed them to the limit.
04:41They won 3 to 2.
04:42And Maradona lifted the cup.
04:44The World Cup had its second great hero.
04:47Argentina became world champions for the second time.
04:50And Diego became what his country needed him to be.
04:54The heir to a throne that did not come from royal blood, but from the mud of the pasture.
04:59The king who was not chosen by the gods, but by the people.
05:03But as if this story were about a Greek god, they too fall.
05:09And Maradona fell.
05:11In Italy 90 he arrived as the big favorite.
05:14And Argentina reached the final.
05:16But Maradona was no longer the same as he had been 4 years earlier.
05:19In Naples, the drug problems were getting worse.
05:22At the 1994 World Cup in the United States, after a euphoric goal against Greece that made people think he was returning to
05:29Better yet, he tested positive for ephedrine and was expelled from the tournament.
05:34It was one of the saddest images in world football.
05:37Maradona leaving the field arm in arm with a doping official, his anger and desolation palpable.
05:44the face.
05:45Then came the darkest years, the health problems, the weight gain, the hospitalizations, the public fights, the scandals.
05:53Maradona became a figure that the world viewed with a mixture of love and pain.
05:58As if he couldn't quite accept that the man who had been a god on the pitch couldn't find
06:05peace outside of him.
06:06There were times when he recovered, when we saw his former brilliance again, like when he directed
06:12to the national team in the South Africa World Cup and even dreamed of producing world champions again.
06:18Time passed and Maradona finally died on November 25, 2020, at the age of 60.
06:25He was still very young.
06:27Argentina wept like it has rarely wept before.
06:30The world stopped.
06:32Because Diego Armando Maradona wasn't just a football player, he was proof that heroes don't come around.
06:38They come from the mud, from the paved neighborhoods, from families who have nothing but the ball. From Olympus, they come from the mud, from the paved neighborhoods, from families who have nothing but the ball.
06:44and the hunger to get ahead.
06:46Its greatness was not only technical, it was symbolic.
06:50He represented all those who came from humble beginnings and dared to stand up to the powerful, to empires, to
06:56The kings, who believed that power was a birthright.
07:00It was never a comfortable voice.
07:03That afternoon against England summed it all up.
07:06The handball goal was the trick of the rogue who survives however he can.
07:10The goal of the century was proof that pure talent, when it is real, does not need lineage.
07:17Maradona was both things at the same time, always.
07:20And that dual nature, that imperfect humanity mixed with a magic that bordered on the inexplicable, is what transformed him
07:29in a figure that time will not erase.
07:32Symbolically he was a demigod.
07:34As a story, don't take that statement too seriously.
07:38Above all, Maradona was one of us.
07:42And he was one of the greatest.
07:47Above all, Maradona was one of the greatest.
Comentarios