Those of us who weren’t there will never forget it: Diego Maradona’s egregious handball followed three minutes later by his virtuoso second goal, greeted with grudging awe by Barry Davies in the BBC commentary box. ‘Oh, you have to say that’s magnificent’, he cried.
For English fans whose memory stretches back 40 years, the two goals Argentina scored in the quarter-final of the 1986 World Cup are among football’s ‘JFK’ moments. We all remember where we were. I was watching in my girlfriend’s sister’s cramped South London bedsit, on a small black-and-white TV. Not that monochrome could leech an extraordinary game of its colour.
In Argentina that quarter-final at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City looms even larger in the collective memory, so much so that an Argentinian-made documentary about it, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is called simply El Partido, or The Match.
You’d think that one of their three victorious World Cup finals might pip it to the definite article. The first one, in 1978, was on home soil for heaven’s sake. But no. It seems that for them this will forever be the match. And the film, which was adapted by writer-directors Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco from a non-fiction book of the same title, explores the reasons why. Unsurprisingly, one of them concerns a scraggy archipelago in the South Atlantic.
Here in Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s decision to go to war following Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 remains an article of faith. Most of us are a little shakier on the details of how they were claimed for the Crown in the first place, in 1765, but for the purposes of this film that’s where the thunderous significance of ‘the match’ begins, 221 years earlier.
Smartly, Cabral and Franco have hired several of the 1986 England players as contributors to The Match, perhaps so that it doesn’t seem like an exercise in shameless jingoism (although it still does, at times).
Maradona and his infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal against England in the 1986 World Cup
Maradona went on to lead Argentina to victory in the World Cup final
Gary Lineker, Peter Shilton and John Barnes all share their memories, along with some of their Argentina counterparts, including Julio Olarticoechea, whose remarkable goal-line clearance with the back of his head, on 86 minutes with the score at 2-1, stopped Lineker stealing in to equalise. In Argentina that moment is considered the game’s second miracle, after Maradona’s solo extravaganza. Olarticoechea himself, tongue in cheek, refers to it as ‘the Nape of God’.
And so to the game’s wildly controversial first goal that, for all the flaws and foibles of VAR, could never happen today. The film reveals that it wasn’t Maradona himself, but far more prosaically a reporter with an Italian news agency, who coined the infamous expression ‘the Hand of God’. Some of us have always preferred the verdict of England manager Bobby Robson. It wasn’t the hand of God, he said, but the ‘hand of a rascal’.
Cabral and Franco don’t try to defend Maradona’s act of cheating, exactly. But they trace its lineage all the way back to the knockabout games of street football in which he honed his spellbinding talent. He admitted to using his hands then too, on occasion, asserting that it didn’t matter if nobody noticed. Bluntly, he had form, hence the sly and well-rehearsed flick of his head as he outjumped Shilton to fist the ball into the England net. That’s what fooled the hapless Tunisian referee.
Outrageously from an English perspective, the film invokes the 1966 World Cup final as moral justification for Maradona’s Hand of God swindle. It shows only one goal from that game and you can guess which. Moreover, it carefully shows Geoff Hurst’s extra-time strike, the one that put England 3-2 ahead against West Germany, from an angle that suggests the ball did not cross the line after hitting the bar. For a Tunisian referee, read an Azerbaijani linesman. The clear message to us is: you win some, you lose some.
In that same tournament, England and Argentina clashed in more ways than one, meeting in a notorious quarter-final at Wembley in which the Argentine captain Antonio Rattin was sent off after a series of shocking fouls.
After the game, when the England right-back George Cohen tried to swap shirts with an opponent, manager Alf Ramsey stepped in, saying ‘we do not exchange shirts with animals’. Here, Ramsey’s ‘animals’ crack has always been a minor footnote in the triumphant story of 1966. In Argentina it rankled for 20 years, until they had the sweetest revenge.
The filmmakers acknowledge England’s place as the cradle of football, the country that invented and codified ‘the beautiful game’, which was duly introduced to South America by British railway workers in the late 19th century.
Maradona finishes off his wonderful solo second goal in the quarter-final despite the efforts of Terry Butcher (left) and keeper Peter Shilton
Former England midfielder Steve Hodge with Maradona’s iconic No10 shirt from the match which he sold at auction for £7.1m
But for every homage there is a mischievous slight. The snap on June 22, 1986 which established beyond doubt that Maradona scored with his hand was taken, we are told, by a Mexican photographer. But even that ended up in the hands of the rapacious English, the film alleges, as an agency whisked the rights from under the nose of the poor uncredited fellow.
Worse still, an Englishman also claimed the ‘holiest relic’ in Argentinian football history, the number 10 shirt that Maradona swapped after the final whistle with England substitute Steve Hodge, and which festered in Hodge’s attic for years until he flogged it at auction four years ago for a mind-boggling £7.1 million.
If we can set aside our indignation at the anti-English bias, which in fairness is tackled with a pretty light touch (unlike one of those tackles of Rattin’s), this is a worthwhile documentary. There’s some great stuff about the eccentric Argentina manager Carlos Bilardo and his bizarre array of superstitions and rituals.
But more than anything it’s a film about a nation’s veneration of one man, who unveiled the very best and the very worst extremes of his footballing personality barely three minutes apart, 40 years ago next month. Yet that’s not how his adoring countryfolk see it. Not at all.
