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The telegraph
How Diego Maradona’s life spiraled to leave him an arthritic, lame shadow of his former self
The final moments of Asif Kapadia’s magnificent film Diego Maradona are almost too painful to watch. To the soundtrack of an interview carried out while he was at the height of his powers in Naples, when he speaks of the football field as a refuge, a sanctuary, a place of freedom where he could express himself without fear, we sees Maradona in her late fifties trying to play five with her friends. The juxtaposition of the glorious athlete of our collective memory and the lame, pot-bellied arthritic shadow he has become is an eloquent reflection of his decline. His downfall was so precipitous it almost seemed like the result of a Faustian pact, a deal to become the world’s most influential footballer in return for an afterlife in sport of misery and self-loathing. The sadness is that any assessment of his genius can only take into account what happened next. It had been a long time coming, but we were given the first indication of his unraveling at the 1994 World Cup. The man who had led his country to victory in 1986, then almost repeated the trick in 1990, was now a drugged parody of his glory days. His spectacle-eyed celebration when he scored his last goal for his country in the game against Greece was a symptom of his personal nightmare: The man was wired beyond repair. Forbidden, betrayed and humiliated, his playing career was over. But back in his homeland, he was still revered. And no wonder, considering what he had delivered. He turned his fame into a lucrative turn as a chat host, before his inability to control his appetites compromised his ability to phrase a question. Still, he knew football, so in 2005 he was offered a sporting director role at Boca Juniors, his former club in the rougher neighborhood of Buenos Aires. In a stadium that, 25 years after his last kick there, remains a sanctuary of his brilliance, his very presence has been an inspiration; Boca won four trophies in two seasons with him watching enthusiastically from his private dressing room. In a way that was to become a role model, however, it didn’t last. He fell out with the club president and was gone.
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