A quarter of a century ago, when Diego Maradona was (supposedly) recovering from cocaine addiction in Cuba at the invitation of his friend Fidel Castro, Argentina's genius and arch-cheat granted me an unforgettable audience.
Though he was massively overweight and had narrowly survived a near-fatal, drug-induced seizure, copious supplies of white powder were still being smuggled into his chalet. Yet, deluded as ever, he assured the world of his invincibility.
'If Maradona does not stop taking drugs he will surely die,' he declared, hubristically referring to himself in the third person like the emperor Julius Caesar.
'And Diego Maradona does not intend to go to heaven with just one Beatle [John Lennon was then the only one to have died]. Maradona will only ascend there when all four Beatles are waiting to meet him.'
Crazy. Pure crazy. And yet this week, five years after his death, the madness that always surrounded Maradona – who consorted with the Italian Mafia, took a 15-year-old Cuban girl as his mistress and bragged of bedding 6,000 women ('you can add a zero' to that, laughs a friend) yet considered himself a global statesman – is back again from beyond the grave.
In a court case that is becoming more sensational by the day, the seven medics caring for him when he died at home of a heart attack, in November 2020, are charged with his manslaughter.
But prosecutors claim their maltreatment went way beyond neglect. They accuse his 'home hospitalisation' team of plotting his murder.
Given his gargantuan excesses, it is something of a miracle that the world's finest – and most egomaniacal – footballer survived until shortly after his 60th birthday in 2020, when he suffered a fatal heart attack while recovering from a brain-bleed operation.
Diego Maradona (right) shakes hands with Leopoldo Luque (left) two weeks before his death in November 2020
Arguably the greatest footballer to have ever lived, Diego Maradona (pictured with his ex-wife Claudia lived a far from healthy life off the pitch
Maradona lifts the World Cup trophy in 1986 after leading Argentina through a tournament where they overcame England in the quarter-final thanks to his infamous 'hand of God'
By then he had swapped cocaine for beer, wine and rum and he retained the appetite, as well as the ego, of a Roman emperor, so it seemed reasonable to assume his death to have been self-inflicted.
But in his homeland the scales never fell from people's eyes.
While the little bull became England's bete-noire after the infamous 'hand of God' goal tha...
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