Diego Maradona should have focused on the team and not on himself.
The Argentina Football Association would not renew Diego Maradona’s contract as the coach unless he fired the support staff. Maradona has refused to do that. Yet, it is not clear whether he will be fired, quit, or agree to some compromise formula. All he has done so far is badmouth his bosses and fly to Venezuela to seek his friend Hugo Chavez’s advice.
Whichever way it goes, we can be guaranteed of entertainment. For, that’s has been the hallmark of Maradona’s nearly two years as coach, in fact of all his years since his decline as a player began around 1990. He was controversial earlier, too, but he made more news for his game. As coach, visibly out of his depth, he gave full vent to his side as the entertainer.
All things wrong with Argentina’s football cannot be attributed to Maradona. After all, only two coaches, Cesar Menotti and Carlos Bilardo, have lifted the World Cup for Argentina. Not since 1990 has Argentina gone past the quarters.
But under Maradona, the team struggled to qualify for the World Cup. There were embarrassing defeats in the build-up – 6-1 in Bolivia, 3-1 at home to Brazil – and qualification came in the nick of time.
Few could understand his persistence with either Ariel Garcé or the sixth striker, Martín Palermo. Fewer did his exclusion of the Inter duo Esteban Cambiasso and Javier Zanetti. The miserable loss to Germany in the World Cup merely confirmed what everyone suspected, that Maradona was no tactical genius. A beard, a sober suit, flailing your arms and kissing your players could only take you this far.
Maradona’s stint would be remembered mainly for his theatrics on the sidelines, his verbal duel with Pele and Platini, his press conferences and his whims. Of that last, running over a cameraman’s foot and cursing him (“What an a***hole you are. How can you put your leg there where it can get run over, man?”) stood out.
Builders remodeled both bathrooms in the two-bedroom suite he called home during the World Cup to accommodate a pair of state-of-the-art bidets, both featuring a warm-air blow-dryer and front and rear bidet wands. Maradona also requested that all the hotel rooms be painted white, and that six PlayStations be made available to the team.
Then there were those two months when he was banned by FIFA for telling the pundits they “take it up the a**e”, then grabbing his crotch and saying the world’s media should “suck it and keep on sucking”.
Instead of these antics, he should have focused on making better use of Lionel Messi, the best footballer in the world, who went home from the tournament goalless. It seems that Maradona let Messi play where he wanted. Not undeniable evidence of tactical brilliance, was it? All that the coach did was defend Messi’s performance. There should have been no need to defend it.
Maradona got away with his antics because many in the media were actually his fans. It would have been difficult to bet the next World Cup on that.
