Maradona: The Hand of God by Jimmy Burns

Author:Jimmy Burns [Burns, Jimmy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

13

King among Godfathers

Just after midday on 5 July 1984 a helicopter with Diego Maradona and his faithful friend and agent Jorge Cyterszpiler on board made its way to Naples’ San Pablo stadium. Maradona had spent the previous twenty-four hours ducking and diving from the thousands of Neapolitans who had wanted simply to catch a glimpse of him. After Maradona’s arrival at the city’s international airport, his driver had taken a back route through secondary roads to avoid the fans who had clogged up the autostrada. Later a Maradona lookalike was hired to provide a further diversion on the island of Capri, briefly throwing the paparazzi off the scent of their real quarry, while the player and his agent escaped by fast launch back to the mainland. Now it was time to declare the chase formally over, with the presentation of the newly transferred Maradona to the tifosi. The local fans had been waiting for hours, working themselves into a collective frenzy which even by the standards of Italy’s excitable football stadiums seemed to verge on mass hysteria.

Ever since news had first leaked out about the negotiations with Barcelona, the arrival of Maradona had been looked forward to with a reverence and sense of expectancy usually reserved for second comings. Naples has lived much of its history amidst subjugation and disaster, its rebellious leanings suppressed by a richer, more powerful North, and its closeness to death symbolized by the volcano of Vesuvius, and the remains of its last great earthquake. In the city no pastime was more passionately followed than football. And yet Naples’ football club, Napoli, had constantly lost out to the big clubs of Seria A centred on central and northern Italy, never winning a league championship, let alone any major European title in its fifty-three-year history. The only trophy that sat in the Napoli boardroom was for an unprestigious tournament, since discontinued, called the Cup of the Alps.

The city of Naples was football and much else. It was Babylon-by-the-Bay, as much pagan as it was mystical, a huge melting pot of humanity where anything and everything was expected to happen. Maradona was flying into a city where people spent as much time working out the astrological meaning of numbers in dreams as they did on the pools, and where devils and harlequins stared from shop windows. But Naples was also the city of San Genaro, the martyred bishop whose freshly spilled blood, bottled by a devout spectator more than 1,700 years ago, still continued to liquefy and froth in its silver reliquary twice a year. Devotion to the local saint had until 1984 been equalled only by adoration of the local Madonna, whose small statue surrounded by candles reproduced itself across the poor quarters of the city.

But with the arrival of Maradona the Neapolitans acquired a third object of veneration. No matter that the footballer’s career had so far been far from faultless, that he had yet to prove himself in a World Cup, or that he had left the majority of Cataláns disillusioned with the manner of his departure.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.