KEN EARLY: Will Messi be loved like Maradona?
The opponents at Napoli’s San Paolo stadium that sunny Sunday were Bari, scrappers who were fighting to avoid relegation. Napoli’s own form was reflected in the condition of their leader and captain: Maradona was visibly overweight and out of form, with only five goals in the league that season, all of them penalties.
He was now physically capable of being Maradona only for a couple of seconds at a time; still sometimes that was enough. In the 55th minute, he wriggled past his marker on the left and curled a cross to the back post where Gianfranco Zola arrived to head the winning goal.
Maradona gave an interview on the field, mobbed by fans, where he said the victory could be the start of a run that would lead to Napoli successfully defending the title they had won the previous year. Immediately after the match, Maradona tested positive for cocaine.
The wheels of Italian justice grinding slowly, Maradona played one more game for Napoli before he was banned and fled the country. The match was away to the Sampdoria of Roberto Mancini and Gianluca Vialli, who would win the Scudetto that season, and though Maradona scored Napoli’s only goal — another penalty — he could do nothing else to prevent a crushing 4-1 defeat.
Within days he had left the country and was back in Argentina on a cocaine-fuelled bender that ended with him being arrested by police in Buenos Aires for drug possession.
Last week we saw Maradona back in Naples, begging the tax authorities to go easy on him over the €37 million in unpaid taxes, interest and penalties they say he owes them. The visit provided more evidence of the devotion Maradona still commands in Naples: he needed a meaty scrum of security men to keep the mob of fans at bay as he was hustled into the building for his press conference.
Looking at the faces of the Napoli fans it was clear that most of them would have been babies or not even born when Maradona played his last game for their club. The man they had come to see is an unsympathetic character in many ways. He was banned from football on separate occasions for both recreational and performance-enhancing drugs. He refused to acknowledge the son he left behind in Naples. He is allegedly a massive tax evader in a country where tax evasion is a national crisis. And still people love him. What are they responding to? His genius, obviously, but there is nothing inherently loveable about genius.
The love of those Naples fans for Maradona is connected to the way he was a genius who was somehow just like them. The Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano wrote: “Maradona is a very popular god because he is the most human of the deities, a dirty, arrogant, overbearing, deceitful, swaggering, vicious god, and all this serves only to multiply his prestige.”
Maradona was the best in the world but he never condescended to anybody. The Swedish football magazine Offside reports Frank Rijkaard’s description of Maradona’s magnanimity towards his team-mates. “‘A lot of the guys he played with at Napoli were not really top players. Many times the pass was played behind him. But still...” Then Rijkaard stands and shows how Maradona applauds and gives the thumbs-up to his sad team-mate.”
It’s getting harder to argue that Maradona might have been the greatest player of all time. Lionel Messi, aged just 25, is already only eight goals away from equalling Maradona’s career total at club level. Yet you wonder whether Messi will ever inspire the kind of affection the tax-evading, drug-test-failing Maradona still inspires.
Certainly his attitude towards his team-mates is different from the one Rijkaard admired in Maradona. When David Villa gave him a bad pass in a match last September against Granada, he found himself being berated by the world’s best player to pass it first time. Villa pleaded that he had tried, he just couldn’t quite get the pass off in time, but as the two of them jogged away Messi continued to bitch about it.
The incident was memorable because otherwise Messi shows so little emotion on the field. Where Maradona was expressive to the point of histrionics, Messi is cold. The emotional difference seems to be reflected in their differing styles of play.
Maradona was improvisational, playing often for the crowd, openly delighting in trickery and deceit, always seeking unexpected ways to pick his opponent’s pocket.
Messi is lucky to play with better players than Maradona played with at Napoli. Messi has been part of a Barcelona machine that has dominated the world and his role is to be the cutting edge. He has been given the freedom to concentrate on doing the simple things with superhuman efficiency. There is something remote about his quiet, self-absorbed brilliance. It’s always said he seems to be on another planet, and the cliche contains a kernel of truth: he’s not like us.
If Maradona was the dirty god with all the habits humans empathise with, Messi is a tidy god who exists at a level quite above our own.
Everyone marvels at him, but who can identify with him? Messi is at an interesting moment in his career as Barcelona have just lost three out of four matches for the first time in almost five years.
The coach, Tito Vilanova, is on medical leave and the two on-field generals, Puyol and Xavi, are struggling for fitness. More than ever, the team is desperate for leadership. Messi has always provided virtuosity but now he needs to take his team-mates with him, to be the leader and the inspiration as Maradona was in Mexico in 1986.
The next few weeks will tell us a lot about whether Messi can ever be a real chief instead of a terrifyingly accomplished Indian.
