Picking your fat mate to play up front, violent training methods and ram raiding reporters. Just your average day when El Diez is running your team.
He said I was like Merse?
Putting Maradona in charge of Argentina always seemed like letting Paul Merson adopt your kids and drive them around in your car after Happy Hour. He’s a remarkable football player, but it was always going to end in disaster. In the build up to the World Cup we saw plenty examples of Diego’s commitment to destroying any chances Argentina had of success. Like Merse, this man really is an obstacle to winning but a sublimely stubborn specimen.
Here’s what he tried while in charge of Argentina
1) Kicking the ball at your mates in training
11 against 11. It’s the toughest game that humanity has given us besides trying to make unthreatening small talk to a stranger or waking up without instantly trying to retire from existence. But according to Diego, you can sweat yourself half to Happy Place against your friends, lose, and then end up with a football pelted at your swingers, by the same people who will probably nick your girlfriend, as punishment. Success!
Duck!
2) Running over cameramen
I’ve not been run over by Maradona, or indeed anyone else. But I know what I want to hear when I’m dazed and on the floor, with a broken hip and a split scalp, lolling my head to the side while I feel warm plasma between my cheek skin and the gravel. No, not ‘Medic!’ or even, ‘You’re going to be fine, but here’s some morphine just for a change from the booze.’ No, no, no. What I want is a five foot ex-coke hobbyist telling me, ‘What an arsehole you are!’ He has, in a second, brilliantly diverted me from my pain by saying something so idiotically unreasonable that I’m determined to support Argentina in whatever way I can.
3) Calling the Press Arseholes
It’s worked for us all. We’ve delivered a great presentation in front of our colleagues and superiors. We’ve won round a client to our enigmatic but occasionally successful way of thinking. However, being a mini fat bastard with a low centre of gravity regally finishing off – ‘inoculating’ he called it – teams with an unsettling ease and a shaky heartbeat means that success is not enough. Maradona goes that vital step further. He switches off the laptop, wipes the nostrils and gets his old man balls out, inviting everyone to have a tongue tickle on them. It’s unorthodox, but it gets results. And he can always blame it on the nasal ‘flu spray and diuretics.
4) James Corden Hooking
Not at all like James Corden, you can imagine Maradona relaxing by taking a couple of hookers to bed and going at it as long as he can keep the defibrilators at bay and the gastric band intact. And especially not like James Corden, you can imagine him, American Psycho style, regarding himself in a gaudy hotel room’s mirror banging a Kings Cross Friend For a Fiver while thinking, ‘this is how I’m going to prepare for victory.’ The experience consummately personalised by cold, greased sausages up all their arses. So, again, nothing like James Corden. Maradona is leading the Argentina team like Jack Nicholson leads his crew in The Departed. With utter amorality, a dumper truck of marching powder, and total charm.
5) Putting an old fat bastard up front and dropping all your good players
Javier Zanetti, Juan Roman Riquelme and Esteban Cambiasso have about 40,000 caps between them. Two of them have just won the Champions League and the other is the player Veron would be if he wasn’t a complete fraud. However, Maradona hasn’t got any of them in his squad for the World Cup. What he does have is Martin Palermo, a man patently not qualified for international football. He has a hat-trick of penalty misses. Approaching the world cup without those two Mourinho disciples is like me trying to chat up a girl without mentioning my untold wealth and gigantic package. Except Javier Zanetti and Esteban Cambiasso actually exist.
You’re all assholes! Suck my balls! What pricks you are!
I Love You
