He was small (1.65 m).
He hasn't always been at his ideal weight.
He multiplied escapades and excesses, sometimes forgetting the most basic hygiene of life.
Diego Maradona was however a pure genius of the game, capable of incredible dazzling, dribbling like almost no one has ever done.
Who other than him would have been able, in the quarter-finals of a World Cup, to dribble six dumbfounded English players to go up half of the field and score a goal, later qualified as "goal of the century"?
It was only three minutes before the "hand of God", this other goal scored with a headline above England goalkeeper Peter Shilton.
It was then a pure genius who played ball: “He had an innate sense of the game, confesses Guy Roux, the former coach of Auxerre who was in the stands in Mexico thirty-four years ago.
He had a chromosome that allowed him to react before everyone else.
Once he had decided what he wanted to do, he had a phenomenal speed of reaction.
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To find the origin of his gift, we must go back to his childhood.
Pelé learned to play with a sock rolled into a ball.
Maradona, a poor child, found another trick: “I always had an orange, balls of paper or rag on me to act as a ball.
Playing football gave me a unique peace, ”he said.
Dodge the tackles of the slum kids
The “Pibe de Oro”, the golden kid, learned to play barefoot in the dust of his childhood neighborhood, the Villa Fiorito slum near Buenos Aires.
It was there, on a "potrero", as the Argentines say, a bumpy ground, with a ball often in bad condition and pieces of wood as goal posts, that he learned the basics.
He was playing in front of kids taller than himself who had only one desire: to break his ankles.
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What better than these conditions worthy of Dickens to learn to handle the ball and pass between his opponents?
Guy Roux concedes: “He was already such a strong kid that in 1978 in Argentina where I was, the Argentines said at the time that they had become world champions without selecting their best player, considered too young.
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Michel Platini, Pelé and Diego Maradona in 1988. Sports Press
The phenomenon has never forgotten this humiliation.
“Maradona was an inventor,” continues the former Auxerre coach.
He was able more than anyone on earth to do anything.
Pelé had that too: this common quality of understanding the game better than everyone else.
All footballers are capable of understanding what to do on the pitch.
But Maradona was doing it brilliantly better and so much faster than everyone else.
This is called genius.