Ken Early: Maradona’s wonder goal a monument to lost freedom

The news on Wednesday that Diego Maradona had died at the age of 60 prompted an immediate and overwhelming paroxysm of nostalgia. 2020 has already been a year of more retro football than anyone had bargained for, but still it only ever takes a minute or two to fall back under the spell of the young and beautiful Maradona, darting past defenders in the Mexican sunshine or whacking one of those insane parabolic volleys over the head of some stupefied Italian goalkeeper.

I first saw many of these images as a child in the late 1980s and to me they have lost none of their glory and power. Maybe future generations will look at the same pictures and think to themselves the sort of patronising things that people think when they look at old sports. A lot of these guys look a bit too thin – or too fat. Was the game really once played this slowly? Wait a minute – is that guy smoking?

Maybe from the perspective of the future, the thing that will seem most wondrous will not necessarily be Maradona’s godlike talent, but the sheer chaos that seems to surround him at all times.

This sort of madness

Look at the immediate aftermath of Argentina winning the World Cup final, as Maradona, the Lord of Chaos, is mobbed by crowds that have apparently flooded onto the pitch from all directions. Who are they all? Nobody knows. Nobody is really in control. For Maradona, this sort of madness is a pretty normal part of the texture of reality.

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Compare this teeming joyous mass to the scene at the end of the last World Cup final in Moscow. Any unauthorised person running on the pitch to congratulate Kylian Mbappé would have been quite literally taking their life in their hands.

The players and coaches were outnumbered on the field by the armed security personnel there to protect presidents Putin, Macron and Grabar-Kitarovic. The only uncontrolled elements were the natural ones, as a sudden cloudburst soaked the grandees before security had time to source umbrellas.

Much of the best footage of Maradona was originally shot on 35mm film for the official movie of the 1986 World Cup, “Hero” – which Fifa posted in its entirety on YouTube on Saturday.

Hero was for many years the top-grossing film in Argentine history, according to film director Anthony E Harrild, whose football credits included “Tor!” the official movie of Euro 88, and “The World’s Greatest Goals: From Charlton to Maradona” – a late 1980s video classic that introduced a generation to the greatness of Pele, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, and Diego himself.

Beautiful old footage

The fact that this beautiful old footage exists at all is due to the resourcefulness of film-makers such as Herbert Raditschnig, the Austrian cinematographer who worked on Hero and later joined forces with Harrild to work on their Euro 88 film. In an academic article published in the year 2000, Harrild described Raditschnig as a "skier and climber" whose professional qualities included "perfect balance" and a "tendency to fight (literally) to gain the best camera positions". He had "no interest in football" but was nevertheless the best in the business because of his "profound understanding of the athlete's body movement".

“Stadia tended to be equipped with crowd fencing,” Harrild wrote. “The production policy was to avoid showing people fenced-in. So Herbert, to the consternation of officials but the cheering of the crowds, would film supporters while balanced on top of a three-metre high fence. The director’s role was to fend off the police.”

Invisible barriers

Just the account of how the footage was obtained cannot help evoking the more ramshackle and improvisational spirit of the time. No cameraman could casually defy police in today’s stadiums, which have become fortresses of regimented conformity. The fences are gone, but it’s seldom that anyone dares to vault the invisible barriers that have replaced them.

Players are having to get used to the idea that ultimate control over what happens on the pitch rests in the hands of people who are not even there

Even players now seldom talk about the game as a space for freedom and self-expression, or the pitch as a place of escape, as their counterparts of earlier generations often did. Today’s players run out on the pitch wearing GPS trackers and knowing that every step they take, every action and inaction is watched, measured and logged in their permanent record.

Now players are having to get used to the idea that ultimate control over what happens on the pitch rests in the hands of people who are not even there. Unseen authorities can order the game paused for minutes at a time while they decide what to do about some mysterious infraction, while all the players can do is stand around and wait for a decision. They can no longer control even the rhythm of their own game: why should they? they’re only the ones playing it.

“Football is the game of deceit,” Maradona says in Asif Kapadia’s superb 2019 documentary, “You feint going over there, then go in the opposite direction . . . and your opponent goes the other way. . . ”

Three pairs of eyes

He’s talking about deceiving opponents but of course it also applied to the referee. When the authorities had only three pairs of eyes with which to police more than seven thousand square metres of pitch, they couldn’t help but miss most of what went on. The players collectively created the apparent reality of the game in real time, and the officials did what they could to keep up. Football was a game of what you could get away with, and getting away with it was an art form in itself.

In today’s football you can’t even get away with the stuff you didn’t do. Under the baleful all-seeing eye of VAR, matches are now decided by unintentional handballs, undetectable fouls, invisible offsides. No incident is too insignificant to be magnified into a game-deciding scandal. The words “clear and obvious” in the VAR protocols are nothing more than a cover for arbitrary enforcement.

This is, above all, immensely boring. As Joe Cole pointed out over the weekend, a video ref would have ruled out both of Maradona’s goals against England – not just the handball but also the run. Nice dribble Diego, but the referee missed a foul by Sergio Batista on Glenn Hoddle at the start of that phase of play. Rules are rules.

As the clanking farce of VAR grinds relentlessly on, we should be grateful that in 1986 there was no video pedant ordering play to restart with a free kick to England, and Maradona’s career masterpiece abides, a monument to the lost freedom of a vanished age.