THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Diego Maradona began his earning life as a street urchin. With other boys from the shanty town, he would play cat and mouse with the ticket collectors on the local train or hitch a ride on a truck to one of the city’s main railway stations. There they would try and earn some pesos by opening the doors of taxis, or selling whatever scrap they’d picked up on the way. One of his more lucrative enterprises involved collecting the silver foil of used cigarette packets and then reselling it. The reality of life for those who lived in Villa Fiorito seemed far removed from the promises of Peron and Evita.

(Burns/Maradona, 1996)

Four minutes later, Maradona scored again, this time with a goal that was to go down in the annals as one of the best in footballing history. In the words of Brian Glanville, it was a goal ‘so unusual, almost romantic, that it might have been scored by some schoolboy hero, or some remote Corinthian, from the days when dribbling was the vogue. It hardly belonged to so apparently a rational and rationalized era as ours, to a period in football when the dribbler seemed almost as extinct as the pterodactyl.’

(Burns/Maradona, 1996)