Why do we still celebrate this man? He is an angry embarrassment...
THE surprise isn’t that Diego Maradona is a pitiful mess. He is almost 30 years tumbling into the maws of mayhem.
The surprise is that people continue to defend him, using the achievements of his playing days as compensation for the angry embarrassment he has become.
The feat that will outlive him, and that should be remembered for as long as the game is played, is inspiring Argentina to win the 1986 World Cup.
It is his towering accomplishment, not because of its significance, but because much of the rest of his career was an enormous disappointment.
The World Cup preceded the inspirational role Maradona played in Napoli winning Serie A for the first time in 1987, doing so again three years later.
His brilliance was crammed into less than half a decade, as is made clear in Jonathan Wilson’s terrific history of Argentine soccer, ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’.
For the rest of his adult life, Maradona has been indistinguishable from chaos, and it was pathetic to see the images of him at the match against Nigeria.
The romantic view is that what sportspeople achieve in the theatre of competition is their legacy, but life is far too complex and messy for that to be true.
It is understandable fans are still in thrall to Maradona the player, but he is gone a long time.