The football work of Diego Maradona It has been so intense and so immense that, a year after his death, indeed long before, it allows him to resist all the darkness and the morbid that surrounds him when the less virtuous sides of his existence are traveled. Nobody who had not been him and who had not done what he did on the court, could have withstood such a negative charge. Diego could, can and will. The devotion that millions of people in Argentina and other areas feel for him of the world is beyond any indication.
Maradonian love is made up of the private and non-transferable album that each one of us carries within ourselves. And that over the years, far from turning sepia, it will become bigger, more beautiful, more imperishable. Like Gardel, Maradona plays better every day. But unlike the Thrush, Diego did not need to die to be a myth and a legend: He was already one in life, although being one was an unbearable exercise for him.
A year after that cursed noon in which Maradona died to us, the Diego of great plays and great goals, the one who knows how much a World Cup weighs, the symbol of the best and the worst of being Argentine, it coincides on the platforms of Justice and television screens with Diego addicted, decadent and uncontrolled. That he had entered an unstoppable spiral of self-destruction long before the last scene in the San Andrés de Tigre neighborhood. And that he couldn’t even stand or reason for himself. That ending still hurts a lot. For the foreseeable, because he saw it coming, because he did not want to see it. Perhaps because we believed that Maradona was eternal like water and air. And that he still had something left to do the last mocking dribble to death. But no. Diego no longer had anything to give. He had already given everything and if something was left, they had already taken it from him. Until the last slice.
But the Maradonians do not care what could have happened within the coldness of four walls. They don’t know it, they didn’t see it, they don’t want to hear it. And if they do, they think it corresponds to an intimacy that only belongs to him. For them, there were and will not be drugs, parties, vices or dominated women, there will only be happiness, an idealized Diego. That for centuries and centuries the English will continue to pass until they score the greatest goal in history, will continue to play World Cups with a busted ankle and will continue to cry because they cut off his legs. Maradona united us in a country of great disunity. And he put the Argentine colors on the highest mast in the world. We all saw and felt that and against that, there is nothing that can oppose it.
.