RIP Diego Maradona

[Kyriakos]

Lineker is not quite impartial source on that matter
Unless there is a direct quote by Maradona, that he very deliberately used his hand, which I doubt.

There is, unless the BBC translated the video falsely

A 19.30.

 

[thetrooper]

Farewell to the cheating cokehead.

Sometimes it's better to not say anything.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Sometimes it's better to not say anything.

Well if he had personal friends or family on the board I wouldn't have. I suspect he doesn't though.

 

[Kyriakos]

Pretty obvious that he won the 1986 world cup by himself. The rest of Argentina looks like a pretty average team.

 

[Hrothbern]

Pretty obvious that he won the 1986 world cup by himself. The rest of Argentina looks like a pretty average team.

yeah
beautiful
one of his great abilities was to dribble almost in a straight line getting opponents with feints out of the way.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Of course it was intentional. Seen some interviews, at no moment he said it clearly but the irony is obvious for any native Spanish speaker.
Anyway few minutes later he dribbled the whole English team and scored the goal of the century, so who cares?

 

[Kyriakos]

Besides, if England had gone to the final it would just lose, like it almost always does against Germany.
Iirc even their one world cup win featured a goal which didn't exist

 

[EnglishEdward]

Strangely enough Diego Maradona reminded me most of all of George Best, another person
whose nervous system was so finely tuned that he found sustained sobriety impossible.

 

[red_elk]

Sobriety is a condition caused by dangerously low level of alcohol in blood?

 

[mitsho]

He's the archetype of the fallen football star. Maybe Gazzo is his competition there.

I have never experienced him on the field, so my view on him is only based on his later years, and well, they are far from flattering. But I can appreciate all the tales told by the older people around me. So yeah, he definitely belongs in the football hall of fame. There's an easy way to debate this. First make a top ten list of players young kids should know about: Puskas, Di Stefano, Pele, Beckenbauer, Maradona, Cruyff, Platini, Buffon, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo (the current one), Messi. And then pull that down to a Top 5 and a Top 3. I'd probably put Maradona still in there. And of course that get's harder and harder the longer Football history goes on.

Three things I noticed while writing that list down:

First, there are no players from the birthplace of football, England. Coincidence?
Secondly, they seem to come in rivalries of two. Seems like you need a "nemesis" to achieve fame.
Thirdly, I naturally made my list only of men. It's an inherent bias that's hard to overcome and well, maybe we should.

And lastly, I've been sent that "meme" from at least five sides over the last few days over whatsapp and elsewhere. It's an obvious example of a viral fake news meme, it's still funny though:

Spoiler :

 

[Kyriakos]

Come on, the Trump one has to be fake

England had a very good team in the Shearer/Owen era, but obviously neither were Maradona level.
And Messi just lacks the character. Not that character alone (with some talent) makes one Maradona either, else there are a few such players, including Hagi and Stoichkov.

 

[GenyaArikado]

Good riddance

 

[Kyriakos]

due to two reasons:

- was wondering if this thread holds the record for most posts in a Rip thread in OT (I vaguely have the sense one other had 3 pages or more)

-didn't want the final post to be against Maradona ^_^

 

[Thorgalaeg]

This is still 2 pages only. A bit more...