“Diary from the 2022 FIFA World Cup” Vol.4
World Cup Quarter-Finals and the “Hand of God”
8th December 2022
“World Cup Quarter-Finals and the “Hand of God”
World Cup Diaries, Day 19
Another rest day in that footballing fandango in Qatar and as we’re on the cusp of the quarter-finals I’ve cast my mind and memory back to a momentous quarter-final of the past and being an Englishman, there can be only one.
I loved Diego Maradona. Perhaps that isn’t the immediate short sentence you’d expect to read from an English born football fan, but I’m no ordinary English football fan. I loved that self confessed street urchin from Argentina and that mop of curly hair in a Barcelona shirt that was just before my memory making days of being a football fan. I remember that Godlike genius more in the pale blue of Napoli and the two Serie A titles the kid from Lanus in Argentina would lead them to, and the last national titles the Neapolitans would celebrate even to this day.
I loved Diego Armando Maradona, but I didn’t love him on 22nd June 1986!
Act One — The Personal Story
Every football fan worth their sporting salt can remember their first World Cup and will date it so. Mine is “Espana 82” and running home from junior school for the daily 4pm game and hoping I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime for the late game. There was a doctor called “Socrates” for Brazil who was also a rather majestic central midfielder with a magnificent beard and there was yet another number 10 in the canary yellow with an exotic sounding singular name, Zico. It was the World Cup of Bryan Robson’s famous first minute goal against France but it was dominated by the goals of Paulo Rossi and the final goal of Marco Tardelli. The apocryphal story was that, after scoring a quite incredible team goal that perfectly encompassed the beauty of that Italian World Cup winning team, as Tardelli went running away in ecstatic celebration he was screaming his name “MARCO TARDELLI” over and over and over again.
He doesn’t, but it makes for a good story!
But “Mexico 86” will always be my official first World Cup and to complicate matters further I can also lay a dubious claim to the tournament held 8 years earlier in Argentina too, but this story is contained within my archives and I’d be honoured if you delved within this strange cave of wonders some other time. The same can be applied here too as I’ve written, and at some length, on this (in)famous day in the summer of 1986 but to summarise a bittersweet tale:
My dear old Dad was dying but my young teenage self either didn’t believe it or simply couldn’t believe it or didn’t want to. But on this particular bright, sunny and warm English summer’s afternoon my Dad was as alive, sprightly and engaged as perhaps he ever would be again and so much so that he watched the game from the comfort of an armchair beside an open balcony door. With my dear old Mum ensconced on the sofa I watched the game perched on the hospital bed that dominated our lounge and I can still picture in my mind’s eye my dear old Dad leaping around, arms in the air at the injustice of it all, and our collective despair as Gary Lineker was just an inch or two away from delivering the footballing justice that would have levelled this World Cup quarter-final game at 2–2 and who knows where history would have taken us all from there?
Football fans of my vintage will always say they spotted Diego Maradona’s cheating handball the very second he did it, but we did, my Dad and I. I can still vividly recall us both screaming that he’d handled the ball, punching it with his hand past a distraught and embarrassed Peter Shilton in the England goal. It was, quite literally, as clear as day, but not to the Tunisian referee and despite the English protestations, Maradona ran screaming to the side of the pitch in celebration of the goal he’d later proclaim as “The Hand of God”.
With 51 minutes played of this quarter-final in the heat of Mexico City, the very centre of Estadio Azteca, and in front of a staggering crowd of 114,580, Argentina led England 1–0.
Act Two — The Story of the Match
Up to that infamous point in World Cup history both teams had gone close to opening the scoring. Argentinian goalkeeper Nery Pumpido mistakenly rushed from his goal line early on and now stranded, could only watch Peter Beardsley’s brilliant curling shot from an acute angle crash into the side netting. At the other end, the villain of the piece Diego Maradona tried an impudent free-kick that had Peter Shilton scrambling across his goal as the delicate chip shot curled narrowly wide.
Then came the goal forever known as “The Hand of God”.
Maradona tried to play a one-two pass with his big, burly striker Jorge Valdano but England midfielder Steve Hodge intervened, sending the ball toward his own goalkeeper. But with Maradona continuing his run in anticipation of a return pass from his striker he leapt for the loose ball with England goalkeeper Peter Shilton, and clearly punched the ball into the net. Central defender Terry Fenwick was nearest to the incident and immediately indicated a handball to the referee and despite both he and Shilton protesting vehemently, the goal stood.
Four minutes later, Diego Armando Maradona would score a goal recognised around the world as the “Goal of the Century”.
11 touches of the ball.
11 seconds.
Sheer poetry in motion.
He begins the move fully 15 yards inside the Argentina half of the field and with three genius touches of his left foot he leaves both Kenny Sansom and Peter Reid trailing in his quickening wake. All left foot and running at pace, he first cuts inside Terry Butcher before cutting outside the defensive lunge of Terry Fenwick and with Peter Shilton leaving his goal line to narrow the angle and a desperate final defensive challenge from Terry Butcher, the little genius simply takes the ball around the advancing goalkeeper before slotting home for arguably the greatest goal ever scored in the history of football.
Obviously I can’t do this otherworldly piece of footballing skill justice. But BBC Radio 2 commentator of the day (and of my day) Bryon Butler, can:
“Maradona, turns like a little eel and comes away from trouble. Little squat man he turns inside Butcher, leaves him for dead. Outside Fenwick, leaves him for dead and tucks the ball away. And that is why Diego Maradona is the greatest player in the world. He buried the English defence. He picked up the ball 40 yards out. First he left one man for dead. First he went past Sansom. It’s a goal of great quality by a player of the greatest quality. It’s England 0 Argentina 2. The first goal should never have been allowed but Maradona has put a seal on his greatness. He’s left his imprint on this World Cup. He’s scored a goal England just couldn’t cope with, they couldn’t face up to. It was beyond their ability. It’s England 0 Diego Maradona 2”.
“like a little eel” — perfect!
2–0 down with 35 minutes to go, England go close through a Glenn Hoddle free-kick (punched away by Nery Pumpido) and a Terry Butcher header before, on 81 minutes, England striker Gary Lineker gives his team hope with a simple back post header. The goal itself had been created by the incredible wing play of John Barnes who would repeat the trick mere minutes later with an almost identical cross. Even on the oft shown replays, Lineker has to score! He simply has to score! But a game saving defensive header ensures a desperate England striker ends up in the net rather than the ball. Diego Maradona, his hand of God and supernatural goal of all time were on their way to a meeting with Belgium in a World Cup semi-final in 3 days time, and England were out of “Mexico 86”.
I can still see my dear old Dad, arms aloft in triumph as we celebrated Lineker’s equalising goal that never was and I’m forever moved to tears at the conversation we had after of the seaside trip together we never made.
Act Three — The after match “story”
“Now I can say what I couldn’t at that moment, what I defined at that time as The Hand of God. What hand of God? It was the hand of Diego!”
Diego Maradona, in his autobiography
“I never spoke of forgiveness. I said only that the story could not be changed, that I do not have to apologize to anyone, because it was a football game in which there were 100,000 people in the Azteca stadium, twenty-two players, that there were two linesmen, that there was one referee, that Shilton (the goalkeeper) speaks up now and he hadn’t noticed, the defenders had to tell him. So the story is already written, nothing can change it. And that was what I said. I never apologized to anyone. Besides, I don’t have to apologize by making a statement to England. For what? To please whom? What pisses me off the most is that they repeat this in Argentina and talk to people who know me. They talk about contradictions. At forty-seven I think that apologizing to the English is stupid.”
Diego Maradona, responding in 2005 to his admission that he used his hand
“We were the most criticised football team in history and suddenly we were the best team of all time. And you know what? One thing is connected to the other. Because thirty years ago nobody believed in us, but we did. And that made us stronger than everybody else”
Diego Maradona on winning the World Cup in 1986 in “Touched by God. How we won the Mexico 86 World Cup”
Postscript
I loved Diego Maradona even in spite of the shame of a horrible USA World Cup in 1994 and the drug scandals (plural) this would kick start past and present. I desperately wanted his madness to rub off on the national team he managed, just one last time, and then I’d wince years later with his out of control antics at yet another World Cup that was about the little genius who was sat in the stands and at great odds with a world he was always fighting and railing against. There was the Netflix documentary of his managerial stint in Mexico and the almost successful chaos that surrounded him as constantly now as the ill health that would soon take him from this earthly mortal coil at just 60 years of age in 2020. There was also the incredible and highly recommended documentary of his life directed by Asif Kapadia.
Diego lives on as does the memory and the recording of that goal on that day in front of 114,580 in Mexico City. He lives on in the murals that surround Napoli’s home ground and a ground now named in his honour. He lives on for the tears in defeat four years later as he came as close as can be to leading Argentina to retaining the World Cup.
Diego Maradona lives on as a cheat, a drug cheat, a street urchin, a scoundrel, a supernatural footballing genius, a passionate and heavily flawed human being.
He lives on in my heart, forever.
Diego Maradona lives on in these brief videos too:
“World Cup Quarter-Finals and the “Hand of God” also moonlights as chapter 19 within my first self-published book “Diary from the 2022 FIFA World Cup” and here’s a handy link for a book I’m rather proud of as well as some other promotional fluff for my self-published pride and joy also available via Amazon and FREE to read should you have an Amazon Kindle “Unlimited” package:
"Diary from the 2022 FIFA World Cup" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.