Still in love, Argentina gambles on Maradona

Diego Armando Maradona, the Argentine idol who almost died of drug and alcohol abuse and obesity a year and a half ago, is a heartbeat away from becoming his country's national team head coach.

It beggars belief, but even so it quickens the pulse of anyone and everyone who ever saw him play.

Maradona, wild and wonderful and sometimes willful on and off the field, emerged from a meeting with the president of Argentina's soccer association, the AFA, to announce on the Fox Sports TV channel: "It's a bit early for congratulations, but its an idea that seduces me."

Even with words, he finds the most beguiling way to say it. He confirms himself as the masculine equivalent to Eva Perón, the actress who so entranced Argentina's state president that he married her and let her shape the national will.

Maradona, too, has his an effect on presidents. He was befriended, even lauded, by the former Argentine head of government Carlos Menem.

He was helped out of his self-inflicted near-death addictions by Fidel CastroFidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.

On Tuesday, it was a meeting with Julio Grondona, the 77-year-old president of the AFA, that apparently allowed Maradona to leapfrog other candidates to become the apparent saviour of the national team.

Grondona is the senior citizen of FIFA, soccer's world governing body. He was at the side of João Havelange, the Brazilian who transformed FIFA's financial power up to 1998, and has remained senior vice president to Sepp BlatterSepp Blatter ever since.

More to the point, Grondona headed Argentina's association when Maradona was a boy and when Maradona captained the team to win the World Cup in 1986. Grondona was also on the committee that had to eject Maradona from the 1994 World Cup in America, condemned for stimulant abuse. "They killed me!" Maradona said of FIFA.

To this day, Grondona's FIFA biographical notes list his all-time favorite player as Diego MaradonaDiego Maradona. One sensed an almost paternal compulsion between the president and the former player on Tuesday night.

On the way into the meeting in Buenos Aires, Grondona mused aloud with the mass media. He said that "all" Argentinean coaches had "possibilities" to be the national coach.

"We didn't expect Basile's decision," he said of the sudden resignation by Alfio Basile, the national trainer until October 16, when he abruptly quit following a surprising defeat in Chile. "We will analyze it well, and we don't want to make a mistake."

The reporters pressed him. They put foward the names of three respected coaches - Carlos Bianchi, Miguel Angel Russo, Sergio Batista. And the name of one who had toyed, very briefly many moons ago, with club management: Maradona.

"Everyone," said the president, "everyone."

When journalists asked for more, Grondona retorted: "This is like your house. You can say what you like, but the one who decides is your wife."

He then went inside. The media speculation flirted with concepts, perhaps Bianchi as head coach with Maradona as his assistant.

Then Maradona, these days a TV personality more than a soccer man, suggested to Radio La Red: "To those saying I don't have experience, I say that tactics are relative, the important thing is to have good players."

Argentina has those beyond question. Among the good, potentially great players, are Lionel MessiLionel Messi and Sergio Agüero, two young men whose quick, darting, inspired movement are as close as any in the world to being reminiscent of Maradona himself.

Yet they, and the national squad, has suffered through lack of belief, a lack of leadership. Argentina, possibly the most gifted country on earth at the moment, had run up a sequence of just one victory, six draws, and that one defeat leading to Basile's departure.

The clamor for Maradona is based more on instinct than a believe that he has the power of motivation. There is no record to show whether he can motivate players, though his past surely offers an inspiration.

"I have the maximum respect for Diego," said Jorge Valdano, his one time strike-mate in the national side. "But he hasn't done any groundwork, which is a basic necessity for coaches who aspire to the highest level. It appears risky to me."

The risk might be ameliorated if the AFA, as it seems likely to do, persuades Carlos Bilardo, Maradona's coach in 1986, to play the elder statesman to the would-be coach. Bilardo heads the Sports Secretariat for Buenos Aires province, and was in the talks Tuesday.

Nothing is ratified, and apparently will not be until the executive committee meets on November 4. It is expected to rubber stamp the appointments of Maradona and Bilardo.

Meanwhile, Maradona, whose bewitching journey began 48 years ago on 30 October 1960 in Villa Fiorito, a "villa miseria" on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, is talking the talk.

"My first job will be watching the players, and picking up the ones who are in the best form," he said. "I'll try to talk to them one by one, first the players here in Argentina, then those in Europe.

"As soon as it is confirmed, I can start working. I can say I am very proud, and I'm putting aside everything for this. My task is to build a solid group, I am sure the guys and Argentinean football will pull through."

As he talks on, the transformation from the player who had it all, and who on more than one occasion had to be forced to accept life-saving treatment against his own addictions, came to mind. So did the image of Maradona, the nation's cheer leader at the last World Cup in Germany in 2006.

The team there was the best on view, but it failed to believe in itself. It has continued that way in South America, though the young players again won the Olympic soccer gold this summer.

As the news evolves, my mind goes back to Fiorito where, 30 years ago, an old woman called out to me: "Forget Maradona, he forgot us!"