Maradona '86 - Goal of the Century

After that description of the Hand of God goal, could Brian Phillips do justice to the other goal – the goal of the century? Yes, he could. He begins:

“I want you to picture Maradona getting the ball 65, 70 yards from the goal. He’s a mile from the goal. He’s on the far side of the halfway line. The whole England team is between him and the goal. You’re not even thinking about him scoring from this spot. Sixty-five yards out.”

 

In case you didn’t get it, he spells it out for you:

“For the next 11 seconds, in this sort of beautiful slow-fast tempo, in which he’s hurrying but also taking his time, he just takes England apart. Do you know how hard it is to dribble through an entire soccer team? You have to control the ball with your feet. You have to set up your next move and your next move and your next move. And all a defender has to do is just—pfft—bap it away from you. Just one little misstep, one guy pokes the ball with his toe, and the move is over.”

And then adds why football is so different from other sports:

“Almost every other popular sport does something to enhance the human body. It gives you a power you don’t normally have. You get a stick to hit the ball with... You get to play in body armor…

 

What soccer does instead is take something away from you. One of the most important things. Your hands.”

 

So yes, doing anything from that distance sounds impossible:

“Under those conditions, to run through an entire defense and score a goal in a World Cup knockout game, with the whole world watching, against your geopolitical archnemesis … it is so breathtakingly hard. It’s almost outside the limits of possibility.”

 

But Maradona does the impossible:

“He pirouettes past Trevor Steven. He breezes by Terry Butcher. He gets by Peter Beardsley. He gets by Terry Fenwick. Every single man in England in 1986 is named either Peter or Terry. The goalkeeper—whose name is Peter!—comes out to stop him and Maradona just … does nothing. He just takes an unexpected extra step before shooting, the simplest possible thing, he dummies him, and the ball rolls right by Peter Shilton, and then he just has to beat Terry Butcher and knock it into the net.

 

He already beat Terry Butcher once. This run lasted so long that Terry Butcher got left behind, caught up, and then got left behind again.”

 

It’s worth watching again and again:

 

Phillips’ comparison is perfect:

“It’s like watching someone checkmate a chess grandmaster in four moves. He destroys an entire defense with no wasted motion.”

And:

“Everyone else out there is fighting gravity and physics and time, the way we’re all fighting them. Maradona is orchestrating them.”

 

The only lament Phillips has about this goal? It never got a name, a la Hand of God Goal. And names do matter:

“People try to call it the Goal of the Century. That’s a weak name. That’s an online poll result. The Hand of God Goal has its own Wikipedia page; the second goal has a subheading. You think names aren’t powerful?”

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