Adiós Maradona: Diego was also the icing on the cake of an Italy ball and dreamer

26 November 20203 years ago babelfish

Left-handers are known to be one of the manifestations of the evil one, as all popular rumors teach. Left-handers in football, then. God forbid. The coaches can't see them, they have to teach them the same things, at least twice. It's like driving in England – you never get used to it. You miss perspective, direction jumps, sense of direction shoulder strap. About England. It must have looked like a truck against Diego hand, when, during those fiery quarter-finals of the world championship in Mexico in 1986, he stuck the ball to his left foot, he discarded two in a pirouette before the midfield, a lightning bolt on the right wing, the return to discard a first English defender, just outside the area the second as an annoying pin, the goalkeeper coming out, and you who are there and say now pull now pull and instead wait for him, drop him, dribbles and with the same lefty (while the defender tried desperately to knock him down from behind) touches the ball into the net. It was in that same match that Mancino challenged Dios, scoring a goal from his hand, in front of the whole world that did not yet have sufficient neurons to hypothesize the VAR (except Aldo Biscardi, who one evening and the other also talked about it to his trial . The slow motion in the field, he called it, his goodness!). We were saying: the coup d'état of the 2-0 Argentine passed off as a header by a dwarf in the midst of his majesty's giants. And who could believe it? Only an illusionist (and the referee), or a Hijo of the devil who, then, would have given his opponent the credit: it was the hand of de Dios that scored, he had ruled at the end of the game. And from there on to the semifinals for the conquest of the second Argentine world cup (the first was the somewhat tarot one in 1978 with the Argentine generals of Videla who had organized a world championship as any provincial president could have done, and where the enemy it was not so much the Netherlands beaten in the final as its captain Johan Cruyff, who in protest had not even left giving him some fascists).

Diego, damn! Sixty years of wonders and pranks.

Do you remember his crazy eyes when he scored one of his crazy left-footed goals against Greece at the 1994 World Cup from outside the box? The last of his career in the national team, nicknamed El Grito in honor of the Cry of Munch, the picture. Everyone said … eh but that sniffs, eh but that is out of the cabeza , eh but what team that has not even managed to reach the quarters, thrown out of Hagi's Romania … Do you remember? Batistuta, Zanetti, Caniggia, Redondo, Simeone, Ortega, Balbo, and yet …

Yet we are here, in this ominous year 2020, a palindrome, leap year, a year to forget, to celebrate the death of what many claim was the greatest footballer in the history of Fútbol . A story of just over a century but still a long one. Diego Armando Maradona who made Naples great, twice, who challenged the Strong Powers of the time (but also of today) by making fun first of the Old Lady of the Advocate and then of the Devil (the fake one) Rossoneri. If you don't remember, go and see his free-kick goal against Tacconi, it was November 3, 1985, Napoli-Juve 1-0; it was within the area of at least a meter, with a cuirassier barrier and a space under the intersection of a few centimeters. A trajectory that still challenges the laws of physics today and that only a crazy left-handed could place under there. For a couple of years Diego gave the illusion to the whole of Italy that the battleships of the north were not unbeatable, that after all who is good in the end wins. It wasn't, of course. He was such a giant in the field that even by cheating the Nordic marpions they could not stop him. But here many will disagree and patience.

We like to remember Diego for what he did on the green lawn and not in the middle of the street, not in his house, not in the beds of the women he conquered, seduced and left, not in politics, not on the bench of his national team in the obscene South African World Cup of 2010, where with a stellar team, perhaps the strongest Argentina of all time, at least potentially, he failed to overcome the quarterfinals. Diego for us is the 80s that in the evening on TV the goals you saw them at 90 ° Minuto or at the Domenica Sportiva with Giampiero Galeazzi who went to find him outside the locker rooms (and there were those horrible interviews posted in the special sponsor spaces ) and asked him "in short Diego what color is the goal (the one against Juve on a free kick, ed )"? These are the years of Drive In late in the evening, with Umberto Smaila showing boobs and asses after football (when the TV was still dominated by the "male patriarchy") and at 7pm on Sunday there was a rerun of the match, one of your choice by the makers of the national popular schedule, and you hoped, often in vain (especially if you supported Casertana or Chessò, Avellino), that they would give you the vision of your team. Years of unforgettable songs, of holidays four months a year, of nights of champions' cups, as Antonello Venditti sang.

And Diego was the icing on the cake of an Italy ball and dreamer. We had won the 1982 World Cup in Spain with Paolo Rossi risen to international glories, the President of the Republic Pertini who blessed the Italian people from the box in Madrid and in front of the hated noble of the house real madridista, and the championships were played by Rome and Juve. And Diego, in fact, had arrived as a gift from heaven. Ah, who knows if one day someone will tell us what false papers Ferlaino made to take him to Naples. Maybe we were a country that still counted for something, even in football. We close with a touch of color. When Diego was training he bet with his teammates that he would hit the intersection of the goalposts while standing. Nobody accepted, they knew they would lose. With the left-handed de Dios and / or the devil you don't mess around, let alone if you bet. A prayer now that you're up there; give us another hijo as strong as you, make it reborn maybe in Italy, we need it so much.

The post Adiós Maradona: Diego was also the icing on the cake of an Italy ball and dreamer appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/rubriche/adios-maradona-diego-fu-anche-la-ciliegina-sulla-torta-di-unitalia-pallonara-e-sognatrice/ on Thu, 26 Nov 2020 04:29:00 +0000.