Diego Maradona: the most incredible coaching hire in history
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If we log in and look south now and then -- way, way south -- we might find that the nation of Argentina has given us a marvelous gift toward our everlasting human struggle to alleviate boredom.
It has hired as its national coach one Diego Maradona, 48, and already this has brought life-affirming giggles for anyone willing to look.
It’s not just the extraordinariness of hiring a soccer icon whose post-retirement days have included that stomach stapling in Colombia, the palling around with Chavez and Castro, the photo naked with the women and the cocaine, and the drug-and-alcohol-fueled hospital stays that led to reports of his death, which by all indications appear to have been erroneous.
It’s not just his capacity for extraordinary quotations, including this peerless gem about his rehabilitating stay in a psychiatric hospital: ‘They were all crazy in there. One said he was Napoleon and they didn’t believe him. I said I was Maradona and they didn’t believe me either.’
And it’s not just that polls showed Argentines opposing his appointment as the national club sits in a nervous third place with eight matches to go in South Africa 2010 World Cup qualifying.
It’s that in merely two weeks, we’ve already had a hefty primer of the glorious clamor that might come. He reportedly named his assistants then the next week unnamed those assistants. Some predictable reports, also reportedly untrue, already had him ready to quit because of bickering over assistants. He toured England to visit some of his Argentina players as some English players turned to mush in his presence.
And there’s the matter of the site of his lidlifter as a manager, a friendly set for Saturday night: Scotland.
Much of the world censured Maradona’s wildly infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal in the 1986 World Cup as it felled England. Many Scottish fans adored Mardaona’s wildly infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal (see video below) in the 1986 World Cup because it felled England. A sports bar in Ayr, Scotland, named itself ‘Hand of God.’
And on Saturday the Tartan Army, Scotland’s fan group, hopes to present Maradona with its player of the year award.
That’s player of the year from 1986.
This very hire might be the all-time sports ringleader in the Couldn’t Have Made It Up division.
-- Chuck Culpepper