Maradona

On November 25th 2020 Maradona died. Even for someone like me this was quite a shock. I’m not a big football fan, I basically only watch European and World Championship matches, no club matches. As a kid I went to a couple of Beerschot games with my grandfather and as a teenager I used to watch football on Sunday with my dad following the Belgian and Dutch competition mostly. Those were the days of a golden generation in Holland so Dutch tv also showed highlights from Spanish and Italian competitions where many Dutch internationals played. Like all boys in those days I played football on the street with friends and of course at school in gym class. That is how far my interest in football goes. Even so Maradona has a special place in my life in the sense that some of the games in world cups that I saw him playing in touched me emotionally. Maradona could turn football into art and sometimes he did things that were so beautiful that watching him play became an emotional experience, similar in some ways to listening to music or looking at a picture, painting or sculpture. A few months before he died I had bought the documentary on iTunes but hadn’t watched it yet. After he died we watched it with the whole family as the kids didn’t really know who Maradona was. The documentary focuses mainly on his Napoli period and ‘explains’ why Maradona had such a troubled life off the field. I doubt anyone could have kept their mind under the conditions he had to live in in Napoli. What he went through is not unlike the fate endured by Avici and Michael Hutchens and described in recent documentaries. After this I also watched a couple of Sporza documentaries and YouTube videos, including the legendary warm up in Germany made by Frank Raes. Watching this warm up demonstrates what an exceptional figure Maradona was on the football field. RIP Diego, for sure you will not be forgotten.