On The Ball | Diego Maradona: the boy wonder who became a god for more than just his ‘hand’
- They still sing his name at Argentinos Juniors and outside the stadium street art shows El Diego as a kid, an adult, lifting the World Cup and ‘Hand of God’
- ‘At that age most kids hear stories, he hears ovations,’ wrote one newspaper of a young Maradona announcing himself to Argentina football
The Estadio Diego Armando Maradona lies in the middle-class suburb of La Paternal, 10 kilometres to the east of the centre of Buenos Aires. The capacity is optimistically listed as 26,000 for the three-sided, mostly terraced home of Argentinos Juniors with concrete stands painted in red and white.
It’s a proud football club with a fine track record of developing young players from Juan Roman Riquelme to Cambiasso, Sorin to Placente, Julio Arca and Coloccini. Maradona is by far the most famous of its graduates and his image is everywhere.
“He put Argentinos Juniors on the map,” Arca, who played Premier League football, tells SCMP. “Once he’d been there, everyone knew it as the club where Maradona started and because the club didn’t have money, they needed to find talents. A wave of talented players came through. None of us were anything like as good as him though.”
