Getting shirty with Maradona
All Whites great Wynton Rufer treasures the time he got the late, great Diego Maradona’s shirt and says scoring the winner against the Argentina superstar made his career in Europe.
Like the rest of the football world, Rufer is mourning ‘‘the sad loss’’ of one of the greatest players of all time. Maradona died in Argentina, aged 60, of a heart attack yesterday.
Rufer – two years younger than Maradona – has been reflecting on a photograph of himself leaving the pitch in Naples after the Uefa Cup third round match in November 1989 between Rufer’s German club Werder Bremen and Maradona’s Napoli.
‘‘Two minutes earlier [before the photograph was taken], I scored the winner – 3-2. One minute later, I get his shirt,’’ Rufer said.
Werder Bremen had led 2-0 in the first leg before Napoli struck back through Brazilian stars Alemao and Careca.
In stoppage time in the second half, Werder launched a last-ditch counterattack and Rufer sprinted away to tuck home a breakaway goal to stun the partisan crowd.
Television footage showed Rufer, then aged 26, asking Maradona, 29, for his shirt as the pair left the pitch.
Rufer said the Argentine star swapped shirts with him seconds later, near the tunnel.
‘‘It was quite cool. That goal against Maradona made me world famous,’’ Rufer said. ‘‘I was quite famous in Germany, but I became headline news all over Europe. They were leading the Italian championship, the best team in the world, and we beat them and I got the winner.’’
Rufer also scored in a 5-1 second leg victory as Werder Bremen completed a 8-3 aggregate win. They lost to Napoli’s Italian rivals Fiorentina in the semifinal, but Rufer won the European Cup Winners Cup with the club in 1992, scoring against Monaco in the final.
Testing his skills against Maradona was the ultimate for a Kiwi who had grown up admiring South America’s superstars.
‘‘It was quite special,’’ Rufer said. ‘‘Maradona won his second Scudeto [Italian Serie A title] that year. He was at the height of his game, and they were also the holders of the Uefa Cup.’’ Rufer was delighted when Maradona agreed to swap shirts. ‘‘I’m walking next to him, he can’t speak English ... but basically he said he wants to change.’’
Rufer wasn’t sure if he still had the Maradona shirt in a cupboard in Auckland, or whether he had loaned it with other mementoes of his career.
But the Oceania footballer of the century said the whole experience of playing against Maradona was surreal.
‘‘A lot of the fields in Italy are like in the movie, Gladiator, where he came up the final flight of stairs into the Coliseum, it’s awesome.
‘‘Before the game, you can imagine it, a little Kiwi from New Zealand [entering that arena]. I knew I had made it, I knew my dream had come true, walking up those steps, 55,000 mental Neapolitans in the crowd, the blue-and-white streamers coming down. I could have died in that moment, and I would have been happy because my dream had come true.
‘‘I’m walking next to a young Gianfranco Zola, Alemao, Careca and at the top of the pack was Maradona, who was absolutely amazing. And that’s before the game, and I ended up scoring the winner.’’
Rufer remembers Maradona as the best player of his generation. ‘‘He was a phenomenal player, he was special. There’s a few players there, the way they can just dance, and move with the ball.
‘‘It was just a little shame that he got carried away with the good life.’’ Wynton Rufer on Diego Maradona
‘‘That South American game was the way I grew up in Wellington, trying to play like Pele and Maradona with their tricks and flicks and juggling.’’
Rufer watched the Werder Bremen-Napoli first leg game during lockdown, and felt he had an ordinary game personally, but ‘‘I couldn’t believe how good my team were on the day’’.
In later life, Rufer met Maradona at various Fifa
functions, and said despite his global fame, the Argentinian was ‘‘quite a humble guy, just a normal human being at the end of the day’’.
‘‘With Maradona, it was just a little shame that he got carried away with the good life.’’
But Rufer said that wouldn’t change the magic that Maradona brought to football during an eventful and glittering career, and the pride he still feels at being on the same pitch, and beating, one of the world’s best.