Maradona | Page 4 | Vital Football

Maradona

MaineRoad_96 said:
Something often forgotten about ‘that’ game in 86, Terry Fenwick was sent out to kick fuck out of Maradona, but couldn’t get near him. So the moral indignation about the handball always rang a bit hollow for me.
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Plus it was down to the referee and linesmen to get a fairly simple decision correct. They didn't.
And players all over the world in all ages will do things and hope the ref doesn't spot it.
His handball goal just one more such instance.
Doubtless there will have been countless fouls committed on him over the years which refs also missed.
Diego will have been sinned against many more times than he was the sinner.
 
My recollection is that there was always "thuggery" (call it what you will) in the English game.

It was when we started playing the "continentals" that other stuff seemed to creep in, the niggly stuff and feigning injury. The trainer going onto the pitch was a rare sight in the English game before that time. It was a rare thing for a match to finish as much as 2 minutes late and you could usually be out of Sincil Bank by quarter to five.
 
NottyImp said:
It's a nice narrative, but I don't believe it for a moment.

See "Dirty Leeds" in the 70s, for example. Football cheating far proceded Maradona in this country alone.

Or "The battle of Santiago". That was 1962. Some right dirty cheating bastards in that.
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See also giving players performance enhancing steroids etc in the 1950s. Wolves & Co were permanently pumped up.
 
GreenNeedle said:
"The change" came when any sport has rules and thus when football became "Association football" making rules as to how the game should be played then people started to cheat. You can't cheat if there are no rules. Once there are then everybody cheats to some degree.
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In fact wasn't that how rugby started? Some cheating tw*t picked up the ball and ran with it! "A fine disregard for rules" reports Wikipedia.
 
GreenNeedle said:
The former I agree with. The latter could be talking about every player at every game in this era. The diving, the yelping in pain, the rolling around, there is much more cheating these days and many more goals (penalties/free kicks) won by cheating than there were back then. Wasn't his fault that the ref and linesman were blind (or paid off.) He did what all of today's footballers do. Try to win by any means and then pass it off as normal or nothing afterward. Managers of those players are no different. They might say they will reprimand the player but the players do it again the next game. All about results.
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Exactly.
Going to guess here, but in all of Shilton's 1000+ games, did he ever tip the ball over the bar only for the ref to give a goal kick and Shilton rush up to ref and say "no ref, that should have been a corner", or did Shilton ever bring a forward down and the ref give nothing, and Shilton then plead that it should have been a penalty?
Of course he never did.

All players get away with decisions frequently and in fact if they ever tried to own up and correct the ref, they'd most likely never get spoken to again by their teammates or picked again by their manager.

The hand of god goal was entirely down to the ref and linesman missing an obvious handball.
 
Rasenimp said:
Unliked outside his homeland? Tell that to Naples in a state of mourning, or the Scots!

If he was yours I imagine he was pretty much the best thing ever.
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An absolute hero in Scotland and still sung about by the Tartan Army at every Scotland game. He in turn loved Scotland. He scored his first goal for Argentina at Hampden and when he had his spell managing his country, he went back to Hampden for his first game.
Viva Escocia, he also said.
Top guy.
 
There's always one exception.

Back in the 1970s there was an incident fairly well-known at the time concerning Crystal Palace midfielder Steve Kember who recalled it afterwards:

"The ball hit a defender and went outside the post, so I threw it for a corner, only for the referee to give a goal. We all went back to the centre circle with Forest players protesting, but the referee finally asked me if it was a goal and I said it wasn't."
 
Just read that Paolo Rossi has passed away today. He was a top striker in that Italy 82 side. Only 64.
 
sedgleyimp said:
Just read that Paolo Rossi has passed away today. He was a top striker in that Italy 82 side. Only 64.
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Stunning World Cup in 82 for Rossi but like Maradona, off field problems, in Rossi's case corruption etc, not that he was alone in that, especially in Italian football.
(And English football very much not exempt from match fixing issues by the way) (and we've had that very close to home ourselves of course with our erstwhile captain, Mr Facey et al).
 
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