Argentina - Australia in 1993: Grondona's "fast coffee" and Maradona's farewell

Diego Maradona challenges Paul Wade during Argentina's victory in the 1994 USA World Cup qualifying playoff match, played in Buenos Aires on November 17, 1993.Mike Hewitt (Getty Images)

Although Argentina and Australia will face each other this Saturday for the first time in a World Cup, in 1993 they staged a duel that was very similar to it: they resolved the last place in the 1994 World Cup in the United States in a dramatic play-off. They were two games in limbo legal, without anti-doping control, in Sydney and Buenos Aires, which marked the return of Diego Maradona to the Albiceleste after three and a half years, after the runner-up in Italy 1990, but which were also a farewell: the idol - who said that he and some of his players consumed a "fast coffee" to gain a physical advantage in the absence of controls - he would no longer officially play in his country after that 1-0 victory against the Oceanics at the Monumental.

Almost three decades later, Argentina begs for another match with Australia (this Saturday, at 8:00 p.m.),

Those crosses against Australia were as raw as Maradona's career.

Argentina had reached the South American Qualifiers as the current double champion of the Copa América and seemed headed for a comfortable World Cup qualification.

But a double defeat against Francisco Maturana's splendid Colombia, including 5-0 in Buenos Aires, dispatched her to crawl for her first and so far only playoffs.

Maradona was not part of that albiceleste, but he returned urgently, like a savior.

The Argentine coach, Alfio Basile, did not want him in his squad, but popular and managerial pressure made it impossible for him and the genius was once again called up to the national team for the matches against Australia.

The return of a bony-faced and increasingly elastic physical Maradona was messianic.

It was not the same as Mexico 86, of course, but it was still enough in the first leg and the revenge to be the best of a stressed team that asked permission to enter the World Cup through the chimney after a 1-1 draw in Sydney -a goal from Abel Balbo- and a tachycardic score 1-0 in Buenos Aires –Gabriel Batistuta's missile, lucky rebound.

The genius motivated his teammates, participated in the play of the Argentine goal in Australia and managed the times of the revenge in a festive Monumental.

But that November 17, 1993, no one suspected that Maradona – except for a friendly against Morocco in Salta, 1,500 kilometers north of Buenos Aires, five months later, in April 1994 – would no longer play for Argentina in his country or that, as would be known much later, those two games had been played without anti-doping controls.

In the shadows had operated the president of the Argentine Football Association (AFA), Julio Grondona, in turn vice president of FIFA, a key name in the last decades of world football, also in the controversial vote of 2010 -four years before of his death – which would favor Qatar 2022. Don Julio, as he was called, used his power in 1993 against an Australia that did not generate the respect it has today.

Diego Maradona disputes the ball with Australian Jenson Van Blerk. Steve Etherington - EMPICS (Getty Images)

The mystery of "speed coffee"

What happened in the Argentina-Australia game in 1993 would begin to be known in 2011, when Maradona –angry with Grondona because he had denied him the possibility of continuing as coach of the national team, after his participation in South Africa 2010– revealed that the Albiceleste had resorted to Medical tricks to energize his players in the playoffs for the United States 1994. “Grondona told us ten days before the game that there was no anti-doping control and to play with Australia they gave you a 'fast coffee'.

They put something in the coffee and you ran around more.

You have to be very stupid if they do ten controls and the game that the qualification for the United States is played there is no control, "said Maradona, without specifying what was in that" fast coffee ", although since then there has been speculation about ephedrine, a stimulant of the Central Nervous System.

In his fight against Grondona, Diego also vented that in Australia, after the first match, he was so excited or stimulated that he kept walking until eight in the morning the next day.

That his then wife, Claudia Villafañe, had to accompany him throughout Sydney.

And he also said that other colleagues could not sleep either, as if they were zombies in the early morning of Australia.

Maradona did not give the names of the players who would have consumed the concoction, although he left Fernando Redondo out, because, he said, the then Tenerife midfielder did not need it.

However, several of the footballers at that time were outraged by Diego for the sayings that, they understood, dirty them, and they came out to deny it.

The AFA was forced, after Maradona's statements, to issue a statement explaining why the controls had not been carried out.

"It did not constitute a regulatory obligation for this type of dispute," justified the body chaired by Grondona.

“Who knows if mistakenly, with the fear that something could happen, I tried not to have anti-doping control in the last game because players came that I don't have in my country and one cannot know what they take and what they stop taking;

Maradona came from having a doping problem”, Grondona would say, putting utility over regulations.

That lack of controls in the Qualifiers acted as a free way for Maradona, whose miraculous physical recovery astonished his admirers and worried the leaders, to star in another of his cyclical returns.

But it was also a self-favor: FIFA needed Argentina and Maradona, not Australia, as detailed in the book

, by Alejandro Wall and this author.

Already in the United States in 1994, eight months after the tachycardic playoff against Australia, Maradona would be expelled for positive ephedrine doping and would never play again with the Argentina shirt.

Subscribe here

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber