On the death of Diego Maradona: the greatness and the tragedy

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The football genius Diego Maradona: Heaven is the place it deserves

Photo: Andy Cantillon / eyevine / laif

Diego Armando Maradona was bigger than football.

Much larger.

Sure, he was one of the best footballers in the world, maybe he was the best in the world, there have been these petty comparisons with Pelé, with Lionel Messi, to whom the glory of this title now belongs for years.

Among them, Diego Maradona was the one who touched people the most.

A single great fate: his game, his life, his tragedy.

A tragedy that included the fact that he had to die at the age of 60.

Diego Maradona, who overwhelmed his opponents on the field because he was superior to them in everything, and who was overwhelmed by life outside the field.

Diego Maradona, the Messiah of Naples, an Argentine who restored the dignity of southern Italy and was overwhelmed by veneration.

Diego Maradona and the hand of God that helped make Argentina world champion.

God, Messiah, these are the categories in which Maradona moved.

In terms of football, it was an event; everyone should consider himself or herself happy who saw him play.

He nibbled on the opponents in rows, his solo runs on the field, where he left four, five, six defenders standing as if he didn't care whether they were there or not.

Everyone knows his famous hand goal against England, the 1-0 in the quarter-finals at the 1986 World Cup, but his second goal in this game when he ran off the center line and let nothing or anyone on this planet stop him until he hit the ball shot into the goal is an oil painting of football.

An auction would bring in millions.

His football was art, there is a famous video of Maradona's warm-up program before a Uefa Cup match at Bayern Munich.

Maradona dances, juggles, flirts with the ball. Has there ever been such a unit?

The defenders chased him all over the place, they tried to knock him down when he hit his hook, stop him by any means, mostly in vain because they were too slow for him.

Andoni Goikoetchea from Athletic Bilbao succeeded.

His brutal attack against the young Maradona in the FC Barcelona dress was pure assault, the young star was injured for three months.

When he was able to play again, Barca had to face Bilbao again in the cup final.

The game ended in a mass brawl on the pitch.

Maradona right in the middle, the emotions were too big.

Even for a club like FC Barcelona, ​​which thrives on great emotions.

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Diego Maradona in the dress of FC Barcelona

Photo: imago images / Horstmüller

Maradona and Barcelona, ​​that was a mesalliance, Maradona and Naples, that was love.

For twelve million euros, you have to imagine today, Napoli's President Corrado Ferlaino piloted him to Italy.

Maradona was received there like a Savior, 75,000 people in the first training.

In the city people were used to humiliation, they lived with them, the north with its big clubs in Milan and Turin spat on the despised Neapolitans, at the away games they were ridiculed, insulted and insulted in the worst possible way.

Maradona understood this sense of shame the city suffered over and over again.

He felt it, the laborer's son from Villa Fiorito, the poor district on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

The defiance of showing it to all those who point the finger at the filthy children has united him and the city.

Maradona felt spurred on, and his greatest athletic years followed.

At the zenith already the core of the crash

He led SSC Napoli to their very first league title in Italy, in the 1986/1987 season, and the city exploded.

She celebrated for a whole summer, even more than Argentina had celebrated the previous summer.

Maradona first made his home country world champion, then his second home country champion.

This year Diego Maradona was at the zenith of his ability, and it was part of his life that the seeds of descent were already laid.

The descent is still too weak, it is more likely to fall.

The enthusiasm, the boundless admiration, it was all too much, too much for this player, too much for this person.

There are athletes about whom there is the sentence: He just wants to play.

Diego Maradona just wanted to play.

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As a master in Naples

Photo: Massimo Sambucetti / AP

He enjoyed the fame too, but enjoyed it excessively.

Drugs, the Camorra, all the droolers who crowded around him and wanted to make money with him, telling him what was best for him and what was the worst.

In addition, there was the media exploited paternity affair about his illegitimate son.

Maradona just wanted to leave, Ferlaino didn't want to let his cash cow go.

The time in Naples, which could have been the happiest, turned into a fiasco.

Human, later also athletic.

The documentary filmmaker Asif Kapadia set a cinematic monument to Maradonas in Naples two years ago, touching, disturbing.

Above all, there is one emotion with which one sees this film: unlimited compassion.

After Naples it was really only going downhill, and there were repeated attempts to drop anchor somewhere, to find their way back into the path from which it was thrown.

In 1994, everyone had actually written him off, he celebrated a comeback at the World Cup, after the 4-0 victory over Greece the world celebrated the resurrection of Diego Armando Maradona.

He seemed to be fully back at his fourth World Cup.

A few days later, his positive doping test became known.

The national player Diego Maradona did not come back afterwards.

Hospital stays and coaching stations alternated, at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa the eleven of Joachim Löw disenchanted Argentina's team, trained by Maradona.

All of his efforts to gain a foothold in the coaching business, whether in the Emirates, in Mexico or with lower-class Argentine clubs, were mostly short-lived.

Alcohol, drugs, withdrawal - Maradona got caught up with it.

A desperate person, trying to get his life under control again and again, failing again and again, with the whole world watching him.

Maradona celebrated his 60th birthday at the end of October, after which he was hospitalized again with serious health problems.

And this time nothing helped, not even the prayers of his compatriots.

The body, it didn't want anymore.

Argentina prescribes a three-day state mourning.

Diego Maradona is in heaven now.

How sad.

But it is the place that it deserves.

Icon: The mirror