'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'.