Hugely overlooked in terms of the greats. Dragged Italy to the final in 1994.
But not at that level. I don’t even think the Brazilian Ronaldo was.
Bottlers who didn’t last long playing into their 30s. Maybe so. Some redemption for original Ronaldo, none for Baggio - he won fuck all either.
I’d rate Maradona much higher though. The most skillful player I’ve ever seen and a complete maverick.
Yet they won 2016 without him
Not this again
Can someone please stop this clown posting here
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How did the semi final go in that competition?
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Was Baggio that good? Never saw him play but watched a 30 min doc on him during the lockdown and it seemed that Juve and possibly one or two of the Milan clubs deemed him surplus to requirements at some stages? Think Juve dropped him for Del Piero?
He scored a few goals against a principality mate
Let’s not derail this one. I’ll want to read it back in time like I do with the Raoul Moat thread.
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Diego Maradona’s epic life almost impossible to squeeze into this unmissable movie
, Chief Sports Writer
Friday June 07 2019, 12.01am BST, The Times
The new Diego Maradona film does not start with a pitch, a goal, a ball but what feels like a car chase through the frenzied streets of Naples. It could be a scene from The French Connection for all the adrenaline, speed, danger.
We are in a convoy of Fiats taking Maradona to a heaving San Paolo Stadium to meet the people of Naples; a scene of bedlam, mass worship but also a foreboding hint of what is to come when the first question from a local journalist is to inquire if the Camorra, the notorious regional arm of the Mafia, is involved. It soon will be.
It is an intense, almost claustrophobic introduction to a film that barely pauses for breath for the next two hours and ten minutes, which, given the subject, is exactly how it should be. There may, possibly, have been one or two better footballers in history but none who has compelled this cinematic attention. Maradona’s story was ripe for telling by Asif Kapadia, the award-winning director of Amy and Senna, whose films are studies in extreme talent — a force that creates magic and adoration but can also trap and distort and corrupt.
Perhaps Diego Maradona could never carry the full punch of those films about Amy Winehouse and Ayrton Senna, given that they have the spectre of tragedy over every scene. Maradona is still alive enough to have condemned the film, released nationwide next Friday, for the tag line on the poster: “Rebel. Hero. Hustler. God.” “I didn’t hustle anyone,” he huffed.
This is an epic life, one that is almost impossible to squeeze into a single movie. Kapadia does his best by wisely framing it around Maradona’s years at Napoli, 1984 to 1991, when he soared to the top of the world and then began his plummet, a journey from sporting heaven to near-death.
Naples always was the best and worst place for Maradona. It was as though he was drawn to this city of volcanoes and earthquakes; the perfect iconoclastic hero for a downtrodden region, a city with a dangerous edge.
How extraordinary to think that Napoli was the only club willing to pay the record £6.9 million fee when Maradona was forced to leave Barcelona after his final game, the Copa del Rey final against Athletic Bilbao, had concluded with a riot. Inevitably, he was in the thick of it, trading kung-fu kicks.
In Naples, the team was hopeless. The city was poor. Fans from the wealthy north, Juventus and Milan, would carry banners declaring “Peasants!” and “Cholera!” Maradona became their rebel leader, his genius unrestrained even by the brutal tackles of Serie A defenders of the 1980s. When he engineers a milestone victory over Juventus with a free kick into the top corner, local news report that five fans fainted in the stadium and two suffered heart attacks. In Naples, where every home has a shrine to Jesus on the wall, soon Maradona’s picture has pride of place
His family were dependent on him ever since his sublime talents lifted them all out of the Villa Fiorito slum on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. In Naples, he carries an entire city.
Heading into the 1986 World Cup, it is all of Argentina borne on that squat, muscular frame. One giant burden on top of another, and with a private life spiralling into excess.
To watch Maradona being chased through the streets, mobbed everywhere he goes, is to think of today’s superstars: one-man corporations with their battalions of lawyers, PRs and agents. He is in the jungle, fending for himself.
Maradona heads to the 1986 World Cup, his crowning glory including that iconic victory over England — “A little bit of cheating, but also a lot of genius,” as Daniel Arcucci, his biographer, puts it — knowing that his mistress Cristiana Sinagra is pregnant. He may be in denial for 30 years but she will tell the world.
The film centres on Maradona’s time at Napoli, from 1984 to 1991
HBO VIA AP
Already he has developed the cocaine habit. Maradona’s links with the Mafia have long been known but the film excels in demonstrating the scale of the relationship built on a ready supply of women and drugs.
The Giuliano family befriend Maradona with invitations to parties he cannot refuse and probably does not want to, not initially anyway. “Any problem you have is also my problem,” Carmine “The Lion” Giuliano tells him.
And this is where, for all that Maradona was the author of his own downfall, Kapadia sees tragedy; how talent can be indulged and exploited but then flicked aside with brutal fickleness. For a book on Maradona, I interviewed Corrado Ferlaino, the former Napoli president, and he revealed the lengths to which they went to indulge Maradona’s cocaine habit, setting out a timetable. Maradona was told that he could party from Sunday to Wednesday. “Come Thursday, he had to be clean,” Ferlaino told me. “Do you get the picture?”
As the film explains, when drug-testing started, the club would go to any lengths to protect their asset including a tube of “borrowed” clean urine shoved down a player’s trousers. Ferlaino admitted staff would manipulate the “random” drawing of players for testing. They indulged him until Maradona started straining to be released, suffocating in a city where even he tired of playing God. He pleads to be released on the pitch minutes after the Uefa Cup has been won between two Serie A titles in 1989. Ferlaino ignores this cry for help.
Napoli want to squeeze more from him but when Argentina met Italy in the World Cup semi-final in 1990, in Naples, and Maradona urges the people of the city to support him against their nation, even his popularity cannot withstand the test of loyalties. Cracks show in his relationship with Naples and, suddenly, there is no one to watch his back.
His Mafia friends? A police wire-tapping investigation into the Camorra snares Maradona, who is accused in court of drug trafficking. He avoids jail with a plea bargain. There is no protection when he tests positive for cocaine after a match against Bari in 1991. A ban for 15 months and he is gone. Having arrived to bedlam, he hurries straight out of Naples. There is no one at the airport to see him off.
In the film there is sympathy and understanding for a man who can exert peerless control of a ball but little else in his life — but there is not, and never could be, the same affection from Kapadia as for God-fearing Senna or the vulnerable, exploited Winehouse.
As his long-time physical trainer, Fernando Signorini, explains — which is why the film carries both parts of the name — there is a split between Diego, the handsome, charismatic captain beloved by team-mates, and Maradona, for whom there are no rules. “For Diego, I would go to the end of the earth,” Signorini says. “For Maradona, I would not take a step.”
“If it was not for Maradona, I would still be in Villa Fiorito,” Maradona responds. He climbed out of that slum not only through extraordinary talent but a force of nature that has, somehow, kept him alive for 58 years.
He is almost too much for one film. “You are bigger than the Pope,” a journalist tells him at one point. “That’s not saying much,” Maradona replies.
During those glory years in Naples, a banner appeared on a wall outside the city cemetery. “You don’t know what you missed,” it read. You really should not miss this.
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Some whining about a game they (England)probably would have lost anyway and an incident that happened early enough in the game for them to salvage a comeback.
Yeah but like George Best I tend to just remember his greatest days not the booze or drugs etc
The Falklands comment is the one to watch there kid
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What Baggio achieved with mushy knees was truly remarkable.
Didn’t off the ball drop his tune from the end of their show because he was accused of raping a woman?
Lovely bit of cut to it. Like the Limerick-Galway rivalry.
You’re obsessed with all these Off the Ball types mate
he was very good tbf differant player to the normal latin player, he was very good in 1990
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