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'We' could not win the World Cup, since no British team had even qualified for the finals in the USA. So the British media decided to restage the glorious Falklands War instead, with the Argentinian captain Diego Maradona cast in the role of the Belgrano, complete with 'Gotcha' headlines. Maradona was kicked out of the World Cup after failing a drugs test. He was found to have traces of the banned substance, ephedrine, in his blood stream. He might have taken it to combat a summer virus. He might have taken it to help him shed weight fast before the World Cup finals began.But one thing is for certain, he did not take it to make him play the kind of football with which he has bewitched the world for a decade. They have not invented a drug that can make you play like Maradona. If they had, even England and Scotland could have qualified for the finals with the aid of a cornershop chemist. But the British media were not interested in any of that. To them Maradona's expulsion from the tournament proved he was 'Dirty -cheat Diego' (the idea is that you say it fast and it sounds like Dirty cheatin' Dago), and they dragged out every has-been British footballer to kick him when he was down. Gary Lineker said it was a case of 'good riddance', and Terry Butcher announced that Maradona should never have been allowed to play in the World Cup in the first place, because his previous drug conviction (for taking cocaine, a drug which definitely does not enhance your ball-juggling skills) meant he was setting a terrible example to young fans. Unlike Mr Butcher, who set them such a fine example by head- butting Tunisians on the pitch while playing for England, and revelling in the jolly 'Up-to-our-knees-in-Fenian-blood'culture of Rangers fans when he played in Glasgow. Of course, the bile displayed by the likes of Lineker and Butcher came purely from their sense of affronted sportsmanship, and had nothing to do with the fact that these players were part of the England team beaten by Maradona in the quarter final of the 1986 World Cup. He humiliated England in that game, not with the Hand of God, but with the second goal, the dazzling run past half of the team that made the Fenwicks and Butchers of the English defence look like the artless shit kickers they were. Lineker won the Golden Boot in that World Cup by scoring six goals, but nobody outside his native Leicester remembers any of them.The ones Maradona scored against England and Belgium on the way to winning the tournament will live in thememory forever. The Argie-bashing bulldogs of the British press have been waiting for revenge ever since, and they sunk their teeth into Maradona with relish. Maradona has been playing on drugs for most of his career. He has had to pump himself full of the pain-killer cortisone, to enable him to play on with the countless injuries inflicted by the Butchers he found wherever he played--in Argentina, in Spain, in Italy and in World Cup tournaments.There was never any outcry about that because cortisone is legal. Indeed the rich men who held his contracts insisted he take the drugs, because their bank balances needed him on the pitch, regardless of the damage which cortisone can do to the body in later life. Similar double standards are evident in every discussion of drugs and sport. The authorities and the media load athletes down with demands to win for their country, then treat them like child murderers if they are caught taking the demand to win at all costs seriously and seeking some chemical assistance. And when somebody is found to be carrying traces of some arbitrarily forbidden substance, another double standard comes into play; how heinous a crime it is considered to be all depends on whose blood sample we are talking about. As athletic coach Charlie Francis put it,'It's a pity for Maradona he wasn't British and running in the Olympics'. Francis coached Ben Johnson,who was stripped of his 100m Olympic gold medal in 1988 after failing adrugs test. Britain's Linford Christie also failed a test after finishing third in the same race, but the officials accepted his explanation that he had only taken ginseng tea. As Francis says, 'Linford Christie had traces of the same kind of drug as Maradona in his sample but they didn't send him home. They gave him a silver medalinstead of a bronze'. Predictably, British commentators showed no such sense of perspective. The often sensible Alan Hansen of the BBC even suggested that we should all have known Maradona was high on something more than adrenalin from his wild -eyed response to scoring a goal against Greece in Argentina's opening match of the World Cup. The mind boggles at what British players like Gascoigne, Wright, Beagrie or the entire Wimbledon team must have been taking all these years, judging by what they get up to when they score. The only home grown pundit to display any sense on the Maradona question was, amazingly, Jimmy Greaves, the man who once, during the post-Falklands World Cup of 1982, announced that he would not want to see the Argies win a game of tiddlywinks. This time, Greavsie told the Sun that he didn't care what Maradona had taken to lose some weight and get fit, his expulsion was a tragedy because the Argentinian was the greatest player of all time. The real criminals were the Fifa officials who had allowed him to be robbed of his fitness and health by thugs in football boots. Perhaps Greaves' own fall from football grace made him more symathetic to Maradona's plight; he lost his place through injury in the World Cup-winning England side of 1966, and subsequently became an alcoholic. But his judgement was cooly sober when he said that he would put the Argentinian ahead even of Pele on the grounds that, unlike the great Brazilian, who played in great teams, Maradona had won the World Cup single-handedly; indeed, said Greaves, if the little man had played for Germany or even England in 1986, then they too would have won the World Cup. In the end that is the only standard by which to judge a truly great player; not what did they take for their weight, but what did they win for their teams? Maradona not only won the World Cup single-handed (given the infamous weakness of his right foot, he arguably won it on one leg), he also conquered the highest quality league in the world, Italy's Serie A. When he joined Napoli, the club had won nothing in its century-long history. In four years of Maradona, they were twice champions and twice runners-up, and won the Uefa cup for good measure. The people in British football today cannot relate to a talent like Maradona's. They prefer, in the words of the dreadful Don Howe,'well- organised teams like them Belgiums'. The record of well-organised British teams speaks for itself. England, despite reaching the World Cup semi-final in 1990, have failed to qualify for three of the last six tournaments. Scotland have made a speciality of qualifying and then being beaten by Costa Rica. Wales have not qualified for almost 40 years. And as for 'our' adopted team, Ireland, which the British media now treats like a national treasure, in the last two World Cups they have played nine games, won one (without the assistance of a penalty shootout) lost three and drawn five, scoring a total of four goals. Argentina, by comparison, won the World Cup in 1978 and 1986, reached the final in 1990, and looked well on the way to repeating that achievement this time around before they were robbed of their captain and inspiration. But never mind, if we can't beat them at football, the Brits can still wipe the floor with them when it comes to the kind of petty, narrow-minded nationalist outburst which can declare that South Korean players all look the same (Alan Parry, ITV), and that Maradona is a disgrace to a game which is played by people like Butcher. British commentators are so blinded by their own prejudices that they really believe everybody else in the world must think like they do.So the gormless Matt Lorenzo could tell ITV viewers that the ousted Maradona would be the subject of popular hatred when he returned to Argentina. In your dreams, mush. Maradona continues to be feted as a hero not just in Argentina, but among the poor everywhere, most of whom interpreted his expulsion from the World Cup as another display of Western contempt towards the third world. Even in Bangladesh, which is not too near to Buenos Aires, there were several days of riots demanding his reinstatement. Partly because of his own background,and partly, no doubt, as a PR exercise, Maradona has always cultivated his relationship with the poor and the oppressed. In Naples he made himself the champion of the backward south of Italy against the rich north (centred in football terms on AC Milan). When Argentina played the Italians in Naples in the semi-final of the 1990 World Cup, Maradona even appealed to Neapolitans to support his team because 'What has Italy ever done for you?'. Maradona has incurred the wrath of no less a bigot than the Pope, because every time His Holiness makes a speech about helping the poor, Maradona demands that the Vatican should give them its own vast wealth. And he has often fallen foul of the Argentinian oligarchy. When he arrived in the USA for the World Cup, Maradona said that, first, he was glad to be in a country where they played football with their hands as well as their feet, and second that he had a message for Argentina's president Carlos Menem:'Instead of swanning around here and boasting to everybody that we are going to win the World Cup,he should think of the poor people at home, on the streets and without jobs.' Or, as Maradona might say if he were a British player, 'It's a world of two halves, Brian'.