The tragedy of Diego Maradona was told in many details this week, but none were so arresting as those contained in a single photograph.
Sensible media outlets carried only a blurred version, but within the confines of a crowded courtroom in Buenos Aires on Tuesday, at the outset of a trial that has been more than four years in coming, the image was exhibited in its rawest, most graphic form.
It was printed onto an A3-sized card, showing Maradona dead on his bed in a pair of blue shorts, his hugely bloated stomach exposed by a black t-shirt that had ridden up over his chest, arms stretched out from his sides. There was no god of football in that picture, just a distressing, unvarnished visual of how his body was discovered at a rented house a little after midday on November 25, 2020.
The prosecutor, Patricio Ferrari, had his reasons for sharing it, of course.
And so he held up the card for a panel of judges to see, a few feet away from Maradona’s three daughters and his ex-wife, before getting to the crux of his opening remarks: ‘This is how he died. Those who say they didn’t notice what was happening to Diego are lying to your face. It was clear.’
Not that anything was ever entirely clear with a man whose gifts could only be matched by his capacity for self-sabotage.
The tragedy of Diego Maradona was told in graphic detail during a trial in Buenos Aires
Doctor Leopoldo Luque (pictured with Maradona in November 2020, just days before his death) is one of seven members of the legend’s medical team to have been put on trial
His medical team have been accused of criminal negligence and face charges of homicide with possible intent over the care he received in the days before his death (pictured: Luque, centre)
The passing of Maradona, who won the World Cup in 1986, threw Argentina into mourning
But to Ferrari, and much of Maradona’s family, there is no ambiguity in this matter. To them, the lines are straight and they lead directly from a footballer’s passing at the age of 60 to their argument that it was caused by catastrophic medical negligence. Hence the trial of seven healthcare professionals who were with Maradona in his final days of pain and confusion.
They each face up to 25 years in prison if found guilty of culpable homicide — a crime akin to involuntary manslaughter, not murder — and when that process ends three or four months from now, another will begin against an eighth person, such is the demand for answers. Such is the rage. Such is the seamless way that the chaos of Maradona’s life has followed him into death.
To follow the terminology used this week by Fernando Burlando, a lawyer representing Maradona’s daughters, their father was ‘murdered’. Ferrari has been only marginally more reserved.
His words on Tuesday: ‘There was no type of control in that home, no type of protocol in a theatre of horror that was that house where Diego Armando Maradona died, where nobody did what they had to do.’
We can’t predict if that will be substantiated over the next few months. But the past four years have brought a near-constant stream of accusations about what happened in the period between November 12, 2020, when Maradona left hospital soon after brain surgery, and his death from a heart attack 13 days later at that property.
Some of them will no doubt be repeated by the 100 or more witnesses called to this trial, like the grim WhatsApp message sent from a neurologist he trusted, Leopoldo Luque, to a business partner in the days before Maradona’s death: ‘The fat man’s going to end up kicking the bucket.’
Luque is among those charged with failing him and, along with a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a pair of medical and nursing coordinators, a doctor and a night nurse, he denies the allegations.
There have also been reports of Maradona being washed down with a hosepipe ‘like an animal’, of him lacking the lucidity to have a proper say in his convalescence, and talking into an imaginary mobile phone or requesting beers at 9am. As with the variety of addictions that ripped him apart in the first place, it is suggested there was an absence of those willing to stand up and get in his way.
Prosecutors showed an image of Maradona at the time of his death to the court on the first day of the trial. The all-time great’s abdomen was completely swollen and he was lying on his bed
Veronica Ojeda, Maradona’s ex-wife, was among those to attend the court proceedings
Dalma Maradona (centre), one of his daughters, also attended the first day of the case
Supporters of Maradona held up a sign demanding ‘Justice’ outside the court in Buenos Aires
The hearse carrying Maradona’s casket to the cemetery in 2020 was greeted by thousands
Then you have the unheeded warnings from a nurse about his pulse climbing to 115 beats a minute — he scored the same number of goals for Napoli once upon a time —and scathing assessments about a staff that were said to lack a defibrillator as well as diligence. He had been dead for an estimated six and a half hours before anyone noticed and they are details that carry this tragedy to deeper places.
Might any of it have been different with different people? Or would that have merely nudged the date back on what always seemed so horribly inevitable? Regrettably, we can probably make a safe guess about at least one of the answers there.
The rest falls in the hands of a court in San Isidro. Situated in the northern reaches of Buenos Aires, it is described as a lovely, sedate suburb for the well-heeled, with cobbled streets wrapped around a Neo-gothic cathedral at its heart, but the place has descended into bedlam in recent days, based on the news coverage.
Aside from flares of blue smoke being fired into the skies, and all the fans screaming ‘justicia’ over police railings, Maradona’s former lover, Veronica Ojeda, was heard shouting ‘daughter of a b****’ at one of the accused on Tuesday.
Owing to the vagaries of social media algorithms, some of those clips appeared on my timeline directly next to one I’d never previously seen of Maradona in action.
It went back to 2000, when he was getting ready for Lothar Matthaus’s testimonial. You can see he’s already overweight, a decade and a half on from when his excesses kicked in, but his touch was preserved as a thing of beauty.
Standing in the tunnel, he starts by rhythmically bouncing the ball between his studs and the floor, six inches up and six inches down, over and again, before shifting gear and heading 13 in a row against the join of the floor and wall, like Steve McQueen with his baseball in the Great Escape.
It’s a wonderful piece of footage, even if it isn’t in a league with what he did on the pitch in his prime, or even the warm up from his days at Napoli, doing those keepie-uppies, laces untied, twitching his hips to a bit of Opus. Live is life. And in life Maradona was so much more than a footballer; he was a means of raising your pulse to 115 beats a minute, whether you were from Argentina or anywhere else.
To nosedive from there to that house, and that end, will forever stand as one of sport’s saddest and most predictable tragedies, irrespective of how the courts apportion blame.
Monahan several hundred shots over par
I’ve been at the Players Championship golf in Florida this week and the trip began with the PGA Tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, supplying a multitude of words in the delivery of little substance.
As ever, that meant a series of long-winded answers that gave zero detail on the status of merger talks with the Saudi backers of the LIV circuit, which are understood to have hit further turbulence after 21 months of stalemate.
With little obvious awareness of the irony, Monahan then announced plans to tackle slow play on the course by handing out penalty strokes. To apply the principle of the latter to the tedium of the former, Monahan and his fellow negotiators are several hundred shots over par by now.
The PGA Tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, supplied words of little substance
Ratcliffe stumped over PR nightmare
Gary Neville stumped Sir Jim Ratcliffe this week by pointing out that Manchester United didn’t need to axe the £40,000 fund to former players. Instead of causing a PR nightmare, Neville argued they could have sent Harry Maguire and a couple of team-mates along to a dinner and the same sum would be easily raised by selling tables to fans.
After a few seconds of thought, Ratcliffe agreed that was a plausible alternative. We sometimes assume great wisdom lives in the super wealthy and often we give away far too much credit.
