Tributes pour in for Maradona after death
The curtain has finally fallen on the life of Argentine football legend Diego Maradona, one of the game’s greatest players. His sudden death left fans all over the world in tremendous grief, and cast a shade of sorrow onto the blue and white jersey of the national team he used to don. He will continue to run forever in everyone’s memories.
Worldwide tributes poured in Thursday after the reports that the Argentina icon passed away at the age of 60, succumbing to heart failure after battling health issues in the past few weeks.
“As the best player in the 20th century, World Cup winner Diego Maradona made a tremendous contribution to the game of football, and brought so many beautiful and indelible memories for Chinese
fans,” the Chinese Football Association wrote in a statement on Thursday morning.
“The death of the Argentine legend heavily saddens all who love the sport. We salute his glorious career and bid farewell to the King of Football,” the statement said.
A household name
Maradona rose to international fame when he lifted the FIFA World Cup as the captain of Team Argentina in 1986, the very first time China started live broadcasting of the football world championship.
His thrilling “Hand of God” goal – scored with the help of his hand – and “Goal of the Century” – scored after dribbling past six opponent players – in the quarterfinal against England became widely popular among Chinese fans.
After returning to the Argentine league, Maradona, along with his Boca Juniors teammates, visited China in 1996 to play friendlies with China’s top- tier league teams at the time – Beijing Guoan and Sichuan Quanxing.
Visiting Beijing in 2008 as an advisor to the Argentine national under- 23 football team, Maradona also witnessed the team winning gold at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
It was the day of Maradona even in China, which is thousands of miles away from Argentina. Many Chinese people swarmed to various online platforms, including China’s Twitterlike Sina Weibo, and used different methods to mourn the legendary player.
Whether or not a football fan, Chinese netizens expressed their respect and love to the mercurial footballer, seeing him off for his final journey to commemorate the solid relationship between him and the country.
The Global Times reporter found that the national flag at the Argentine Embassy in Beijing flied at half mast on Thursday to mourn the death of Maradona. Some Chinese football fans, most of whom were born after the 1970s, went to the Argentine Embassy in Beijing on Thursday with flowers and candles to see off the legendary football player. They put flowers in front of the No. 10 shirt, a symbol of Maradona. The shirt was packed into a glass frame and placed outside the embassy, along with a replica of the FIFA World Cup. They put their palms together devoutly to mourn the player and wiped their tears silently.
“Half- angel, half- devil”
Maradona was first dubbed by the French newspaper L’Equipe as “half- angel, half- devil” for the majesty of his second goal and the notoriety of his first in the quarterfinal win against England in the 1986 World Cup. And such characterizations of his game continued in his life.
The legendary life of Maradona transcends the sport of football itself, earning him the status of an Argentine national icon and a worldwide idol, yet his personal lifestyle has been a matter of controversy, observers said.
Maradona’s heyday came in before the advent of the information age, and enlightened Chinese fans of earlier generations what the best player was like, Wang Dazhao, a Beijing- based sports commentator, told the Global Times. If being a great player and a decent man at the same time is the most demanding task, Maradona accomplished half of it with almost perfection in his lifetime but left the other half unfinished, he said.