The Argentinian is small, but cannot be knocked down. A mockery of physics, he laughs at gravity as he thunders down the touchline, the ball stuck tight to his feet. His squat frame and goofy haircut make him easy to spot, even on a blurry TV, but one rarely loses track of him because it’s impossible to stop watching in the first place. With a twitch of his left foot, he can score from anywhere. He is Messi, and he is Maradona too.
Comparing Messi to that other, more tragic #10 is as inevitable as it is unfair. For the same muddy reasons, whatever happens in Sunday’s match will be considered in context of the 1986 final, when Maradona’s Argentina beat Germany 3-2 in the sort of raucous back-and-forth that we simply don’t see any more. It was the last great final, and though it tells us nothing about what will happen Sunday, it does suggest a few grim conclusions about the sport itself. Watch the tape of Maradona’s greatest triumph, and you may come to suspect that a game which once showcased brilliance now does everything it can to snuff it out.
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“Have you heard Messi’s name once this half?!” shouted a frustrated Argentina fan during the semi-final against the Netherlands. “He’s invisible!”
Soccer As a Religion: The Church of Maradona. Watch now.
Messi has long had a reputation of vanishing during Argentina matches, double- or triple-teamed into thin air. A player so universally acknowledged to be the world’s best demands special attention, and teams craft whole game plans around him, suffocating the game in an effort to keep his creativity contained. On Wednesday, Argentina joined in, playing five men in defense in order to keep Arjen Robben from displaying any of his own particular brilliance. Starved of service, Messi disappeared slowly, like the siblings in a McFly family photo, and the match died in midfield.
This is the football of fear. Rather than planning his tactics around the century’s finest attacker, Argentina manager Alejandro Sabella focused on stopping the other guy. The strategy is simple: keep the game scoreless as long as possible, and Messi will eventually find a way to score single-handedly. Several times this tournament, it has worked. That doesn’t make it good football, and that doesn’t mean it will work against Germany—a loose, attacking side who have been playing with the kind of verve usually expected from South American teams.
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That stereotype is based not just on the great Brazilian teams of Pelé, Sócrates, and Ronaldo, but on the Argentina of 1986—a team that seems to have been constructed entirely so that the world could appreciate Diego Maradona, a squat little madman whose thighs looked like Christmas hams.
Have you ever seen a bulldog stop in the middle of the street? They plant their legs firmly, digging toenails into asphalt as their owners try to drag them to the sidewalk. The harder you pull, the stronger they get. When Maradona didn’t want to move, he couldn’t be pushed, but when he ran it was with the giddy enthusiasm of a puppy. Every time he got the ball, he wanted to score—not this half, not this minute, but right goddamned now. In a day when the best teams build attacks slowly, it is amazing to watch an old Maradona match, when every possession began with a headlong sprint towards goal.
Today’s great players don’t waste opportunities. They don’t take bad shots or run straight at defenders or take low-percentage shots. But impossibility never intimidated Maradona. Over and over in the ’86 tournament, he attempts impossible runs and foolish shots, usually giving up the ball but occasionally doing things like this. A famous picture from the 1986 semi-final shows him taking on most of the Belgian team all at once, one of the finest sides in Europe as frightened and disorganized as a kindergarten side. Belgium didn’t actually sextuple-team him—I think that picture comes just after a free kick—but they couldn’t have stopped him if they had.
Photo via FIFA
The 2014 team is a chain holding Messi to earth, but the 1986 squad was designed as the launchpad for the rocket Maradona. Ditching the standard 4-4-2, manager Carlos Bilardo adopted a then-revolutionary 3-5-2, sacrificing defense in order to move the ball through midfield—and to Maradona’s feet—as quickly as possible. As he inspired the formation, so Maradona inspired his teammates, who did everything they could to match his fervor. Give them the ball, and they would charge forward, making scoring chances through sheer enthusiasm. Lose the ball? We’ll get it back. Concede a goal? We’ll score some more. It shouldn’t have worked, but this was a team not bound by the constraints of good sense.
Maradona did not score in the final, but he was not contained. The German defenders did their best to mark him out of the game—just as they will to Messi on Sunday—but he either bulldozed past or took advantage of the space their marking created for his teammates. He won the free kick that led to the first goal, and played a nifty midfield pass that set up their second—a beautiful team effort that shows what you can do when the opposing defenders are distracted by a player who’s forty yards away.
After being overrun for more than an hour, Germany scored off a clumsy corner kick halfway through the second half. Rather than buckle down to defend their lead, Argentina kept trying to score. Germany tied it a few minutes later, and so Argentina did what they had to do. As a white dove marched around the pitch, Maradona tapped the ball forward to Jorge Burruchaga, a surgical pass that took him right to the mouth of goal. A defender bearing down, the goalie racing out, a sensible player would have passed rather than shot. But this team wasn’t sensible. They were fun. He took the impossible shot, and the match was over.
(Even in the 92nd minute, Maradona was looking for a fourth goal, and why shouldn’t he have been? Goals are fun.)
There are reasons we cannot play this way any more. Defenders are faster than they were in 1986, and back lines don’t fall apart the way the Germans’ did, over and over, in 1986. But as long as World Cup teams build their strategies around killing the other team’s game, and not showcasing their own, we will never again have a great final. As they prepare for Sunday’s match, Argentina should remember the lesson of ’86. If you have an impossible player, attempt impossible things.
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W.M. Akers is a Tennessee playwright who lives in New York. A features editor for Narratively, he is good at Twitter.
