OLIVER HOLT: Diego Maradona changed my life when I was 17

When I was 17, I took a school trip. The school thought it was important and organized a minibus. I made up an elaborate excuse to avoid the bus ride.

I said I’d drive there myself. Not because he was being flash. Not because I just passed my test.

But because he knew that if he went by minibus, he would not get back to Manchester in time. I would lose the game. I would miss seeing Diego Maradona play.

I left early but still knew it was going to be tight. I hit my old car within an inch of its life on the highway back north until it shuddered and shook. It was the start of 7:30 pm and I arrived at Old Trafford 10 minutes late, in a panic that they wouldn’t let me in.

He had a ticket to the Stretford Paddock and could hear the crowd roaring as he ran over the railroad walkway. There was still an open turnstile.

Then I saw him with the yellow Barcelona away jersey and a kind of relief flooded me. It might sound pathetic now, but to me it felt like the achievement of a dream.

He had seen the best footballer in the world play live. It’s hard to explain to people who don’t love football how that feels to a fan. It is a kind of communion that cannot be obtained by watching on television.

You watch a player perform live and tell yourself that the connection between you and a deity is a little more exclusive. It is different than if you are sitting in your living room watching a movie in motion and Maradona personifies everything he loved about soccer.

I suppose it could be similar to seeing Olivier stepping on the stage or Sinatra on stage at The Sands. Are you there. You are part of the same experience. You are breathing the same night air.

It didn’t matter that the game wasn’t about him in the end. It turned out to be one of the best nights in United’s European history as they rallied from a 2-0 deficit in the first leg and sent Maradona and Barcelona crashing out of the Recopa de Europa. I loved that too, but above all I was happy to have seen the best player in the world.

I only saw him play live once after that. It was in 1987, a year after he had led Argentina to victory in the Mexico World Cup, and he played for the rest of the world against a Football League XI at Wembley to celebrate the league’s centenary. This time it wasn’t Maradona’s day either. His team lost 3-0.

I only remember two things about it. Maradona was booed every time he touched the ball, partly because stories had spread all week that he would not play unless he was paid £ 100,000, and partly because some couldn’t forgive the Hand of God goal in the world Cup.

The boo shook me at that moment. I hated it. In the face of the outpouring of love and adoration that followed her death, the memory of her is stirred even more now. And there was a moment of beauty to counteract that ugliness.

Maradona dribbled into the opponent’s area and skillfully threw the ball to Peter Shilton with the outside of his left boot. The ball slipped into the corner of the goal, but passed inches from the post. In my memory, Maradona put his hands to his head.

That’s. I’m afraid it’s pretty banal. My Maradona stories have nothing fancy. I never met him. I never interviewed him. But seeing him that night at Old Trafford, in particular, crystallized something in me.

It had a profound effect on me, not because of what he did that night, but because seeing the best player in the world in action made me realize that nothing I pursued in professional life was going to give me the thrill of watching sports.

Different people see beauty in different things. I see beauty in sports. It’s what inspires me the most and Maradona was the personification of that. His genius legitimized that.

It all goes back to a line I have seen mentioned by colleagues at the newspaper in the wake of his death last week and the wave of grief and tribute that followed.

“I don’t care what Maradona did with his life,” Argentine writer and cartoonist Roberto Fontanarrosa once wrote. I care what he did with mine.

Almost everyone has framed their tributes in the way that Maradona made them feel about themselves. I’m no different.It’s about what it did for each of us, what it unlocked in us, the joy it brought, the way we associate it with our youth, and the first thrill of appreciating a beauty like that.

He was a virtuoso and, if some find exaltation in a musician or an actor, a dancer or a thinker, many of us find it in Maradona and the genius that paraded before us.

He was part of a royal line that ran from Pelé to Johan Cruyff and, through him, to Brazilian Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane and Lionel Messi. Messi is now in the fall of his career and there is still no successor.

Perhaps it is another wonder child of Barcelona, ​​Ansu Fati. Maybe it’s Youssoufa Moukoko, who made his Borussia Dortmund debut this month at 16 years and 1 day of age.

It’s out there somewhere and when it comes out, we’ll know. The king is dead but another will come to change lives, inspire dreams, create joy and change horizons for this generation just as Maradona did for mine.

Lewis, a shoo-in for SPOTY

The BBC has made an art form of manipulating the outcome of the Sports Personality of the Year award as of late and their decision to exclude Marcus Rashford from this year’s vote and give him a different gong instead is another good example. of the genre.

The move at least ensures that the winner will be Lewis Hamilton, who equaled Michael Schumacher’s record by winning the Formula One drivers’ world title for the seventh time this season. Nigel Mansell won the title once, but won the BBC award twice. The same ratio applies to Damon Hill.

So far Hamilton has only one of the awards for his seven titles. The discrepancy may be partly explained by the migration of F1 from terrestrial television, but it remains strange. This year should mark an opportunity to restore the balance a little in Hamilton’s favor.

Just not fair? Give me a break

Marcelo Bielsa and Steve Bruce complained last week that allowing fans to return to some Premier League grounds but not others would give clubs that can admit fans an unfair advantage.

Bruce’s argument, in particular, grew out of disappointment that Newcastle fans should be denied the chance to see their team in action, but there is evidence that some attacking players have been freed by the absence of supporters.

If the presence of 2,000 fans in stadiums that are 20 or 30 times that many is enough to intimidate their players, perhaps Bielsa and Bruce should be asking questions about their character.