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23 Sport maltatoday, WEDNESDAY, 14 MAY 2014 WORLD CUP SPECIAL Mexico 86: Diego Maradona's 'most sublime' moment MARCELO ANDROET TO "IT was the most sublime mo- ment in my career, the most sub- lime," Maradona recalls. Decades have gone by, and foot- age of his performances is still well known to most football lov- ers: Maradona's goals against England – the infamous "Hand of God " goal and also the master- piece, - his perfect assist for Jorge Burruchaga to settle the final against Germany, the crazy cel- ebrations at the Estadio Azteca. "It was not just me, there was a team. Argentina were the champi- ons not just because of me. I made a contribution, others helped me, we all won," Maradona wrote in his book Yo soy El Diego. "I am grateful to have been considered the best player in the World Cup, but I won with Argentina, I did not win alone." However, Maradona's personal weight in that team coached by Carlos Bilardo probably sur- passed any historical precedent of a single player's inf luence on a team, and not just because he scored five goals in the tourna- ment. "I don't want to underrate the other players in his national team, but I don't remember any other footballer as decisive in winning a title as Maradona was in Mex- ico," Spain's Emilio Butragueno told dpa.Butragueno still feels that Spain should have played the semi-finals of that World Cup. "Beating Argentina would have been very difficult because at that time Maradona was on a different level," said the former Real Madrid striker, whose team lost to Belgium in the penalt y shootout, in the quarter-finals of the tournament. "We were elimi- nated in a match that we should have won." Maradona did better, and his two great goals against Belgium gave Argentina a berth in the fi- nal. "I took the World Cup as an ob- ligation. I wanted to score goals, to distribute play, to dive at ri- vals' feet, to arrange my team, to mark rivals," Maradona says. "I promised it to myself as a dut y. I did not do it so everyone would say that Maradona was a star. I did it so Argentina would be the champions." The so-called "Golden Boy" of Argentine football reached the World Cup at his best as a foot- baller: he was 25 and he was al- ready an icon at Napoli. However, before the start of the tourna- ment most critics had been say- ing that the next king of the sport would be either France's Michel Platini or Brazil 's Zico. Until then, World Cups had been a sort of painful memory for Maradona: in Argentina 1978 he was excluded from the squad at the last minute, and in Spain 1982 he had to endure a second- round exit and he was himself sent off in the team's last match against Brazil. But Mexico 1986 would change everything. Three years earlier, coach Bi- lardo had told Maradona that he was the team's only definite starter and that he was guaran- teed to be its captain. "I wanted to be the captain, the boss, Bilardo's number one. That was what I had always dreamt of being: to represent every Argen- tine footballer, each and every one of them." Argentina emerged as a clear candidate to lift the trophy with their 2-1 win over England in the quarter-finals, a match that, as Maradona himself says, had lots of ingredients beyond football. "Although we said that foot- ball had nothing to do with the Malvinas (Falklands) War, we knew that lots of Argentine lads had died there, that they had been killed like little birds. And this was a sort of revenge," he said. "In a way, we held England players re- sponsible for everything that had happened. I know it sounds crazy, but it was beyond us." Maradona did justice, from his own perspective, with two goals that describe him fully: street wisdom and magic. "The first one I defined at the time as the 'Hand of God '... What hand of God? It was the hand of Diego! And it was like stealing English people's wallet too," he recalls. Maradona used his left fist to beat England keeper Peter Shilton and net the ball, a trick so perfect that it was not even clear on tel- evision. "No, that was not right," Mara- dona would later tell dpa. "But the 'Hand of God ' was a goal because God wanted it to be, and because the referee did not see it." The best was yet to come, how- ever, his most sublime work in- deed: Maradona started from his own half of the pitch and went on an unstoppable 10-second run, in which he left half the rival team on the ground before scoring. "To this day, it seems incred- ible that I managed it. Seriously, I think it's impossible to score a goal like that. You can dream of it but you will never make it. By now, it's a myth," Maradona ad- mitted. DPA The Mexico 1986 World Cup appointed Diego Maradona as the new god of football: as he led Argentina to their second World Cup title, the playmaker's magic appeared to fill the space that Brazil's Pele had left vacant 16 years earlier "It was the most sublime moment in my career, the most sublime," Maradona recalls Mexico 1986 World Cup. Photo by: picture-alliance

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