To the death

In his 60 years on earth, Diego Maradona shovelled all sorts into his body. But nothing stimulated him quite like the biological resource of bronca. Maradona described it as “a very Argentinian word to denote anger, fury, hatred, resentment, bitter discontent.” And he usually produced it industrial quantities.

Bronca was Maradona’s energy for the entirety of his football career, through good and bad, in glory and disgrace. It was never more powerful than during Italia 90, when he set about retaining the World Cup trophy that he had won for Argentina four years earlier. Maradona shouldn’t even have been playing, given the state of his crumbling body; his team-mate Julio Olarticoechea estimated he was playing at “50 per cent or less”. Yet through an almost demented will – and one divine bit of skill – he dragged a mediocre Argentina side to the final. During a month of unprecedented intensity, he experienced greater extremes of emotion than most people do in a lifetime.

Maradona warmed up for the tournament by matter-of-factly announcing the draw had been fixed to favour Italy and jeopardise Argentina. “The shit hit the fan,” he said in his autobiography, El Diego. “I knew from the word go that Italia 90 was going to be difficult for us.”

Not that he was ever going to shy away from the challenge. “Whoever wants to win the World Cup,” he said on the eve of the tournament, “is going to have to snatch it from Maradona.” The cold, dead hands were implied.

Argentina’s pre-tournament form was wretched, with only one win in 10 games, and nobody gave them much chance even with Maradona in the team. The 1989-90 season had been eventful, even by Maradona’s standards. It started with him going awol. He asked to move to Marseille because he wanted a change, Napoli declined, so Maradona buggered off on a series of holidays after playing for Argentina at the Copa America. When he belatedly returned to Naples he was out of shape and form, but revved up over the season and eventually drove Napoli to their second title in three years. By the end of the season, he was close to his peak.

Maradona and his personal trainer Fernando Signorini designed a fitness programme to ensure he would be in even better shape for Italia 90 than he was at Mexico 86. He spent $60,000 to have a state-of-the-art fitness machine installed at Trigoria, the Roma training ground that was Argentina’s base for the tournament. “When I got off the running machine, it was literally smoking,” he said. “God, I was in unbelievable shape!”

But his mind was as restless as ever. He argued with the coach Carlos Bilardo over the omission from the squad of Jorge Valdano, his friend and strike partner at Mexico 86, who had come out of retirement earlier in the year. The natural successor to Valdano was Claudio Caniggia, a dynamic young forward who played in Serie A for Atalanta. There was speculation that Caniggia would also miss out, so Maradona gave Bilardo an ultimatum: if Caniggia wasn’t in the squad, nor was Maradona.

Maradona brought both his Ferraris to the training camp, “because I needed to feel at home”, and would use them to relax when Bilardo allowed him to leave Trigoria. Those drives were one of the few times throughout the World Cup that Maradona could uncoil. The focus on him would have overwhelmed 99.99 per cent of the population. “For the whole world,” he said, “I was permanently sitting an exam.” In the previous World Cup, he had reached the highest peaks in football history; now he had to deliver the follow-up album.

The scrutiny increased enormously because of the location of the tournament: Italy, a place where Maradona was loathed or worshipped, nothing in between. He had inspired Napoli to the only two league titles in their history and thrived on the fact that the club were insurgents from the south who beat the aristocracy from the north. “Poverty is good for nothing, except football,” said Maradona’s great friend Valdano, and the poverty that Maradona grew up in never left him. He may have been the world’s best player but he was never more alive than when was raging against the establishment. Every time Napoli played in the north of Italy, Maradona noticed the banners among the home supporters that said Neapolitans were an inferior race, and his bronca increased accordingly. “The worst was the ‘Welcome to Italy’ banners,” he said. “That whole North v South battle made me stronger and gave me a chance to do what I like best: fight for a cause. And if it’s the cause of the poor, so much the better.”

As Italia 90 approached, Maradona’s fitness started to decline. First he had a bout of flu, then an ingrowing toenail on his right foot. Various treatments – injections, cotton wool, bigger boots – didn't work, and he became increasingly exasperated that such an apparently minor injury could cause so much trouble. He had to miss training for a few days in the week before the opening game of the tournament: Argentina v Cameroon in Milan. “The pain was so bad,” he said. “I was scared of missing the World Cup, that was the truth.”

A solution was eventually found: a splint made of carbon fibre that enabled him to play. The night before the tournament, the Argentina president Carlos Menem presented Maradona with a diplomatic passport which made him “an ambassador for sport for Argentina throughout the world”. For the next month, as it turned out, he was the chief ambassador for Argentina against the world.

In the dressing-room before the Cameroon match, Maradona sensed a subdued atmosphere and tried to rouse the team with an impromptu speech: “C’mon, up! Fucking c’mon! This is a World Cup and we’re the world champions!” The defiant message would get eventually get through to his team, though not on that day in Milan. Argentina were beaten 1-0, a humiliating and seismic defeat. At the time it was one of the greatest shocks in World Cup history. Cameroon ended with nine men, and it might have been worse: in the first half, Victor N’Dip was only booked for planting his studs into the top of Maradona's left arm as they competed for a bouncing ball.

One of the two players who was sent off, Benjamin Massing, is remembered for the comically brutal foul on Claudio Caniggia that led to his second yellow card. What is often forgotten is that he spent the rest of the game marking Maradona, literally and metaphorically. The first yellow card of the tournament was shown after 10 minutes when he booted Maradona up in the air via the right ankle.

Maradona started the game excellently but faded and, by his own admission, gave up when Cameroon scored after 67 minutes. “I left the pitch,” he said. “I was there but I wasn’t there.”

The football world was high on schadenfreude at Argentina and especially Maradona’s humiliation. Before the game, the local crowd – AC Milan were Napoli’s biggest domestic rivals – booed the Argentina anthem with feeling, and then jeered Maradona every time he touched the ball. Maradona gained a victory of sorts with a majestic performance in front of the press after the game. He disarmed the media by saying Cameroon deserved to win, and that the first red card was unfair, and then turned his attention to the Milanese crowd. “The only pleasure I got this afternoon was to discover that thanks to me the people of Milan have stopped being racist,” he said. “Today, for the first time, they supported the Africans.”

Argentina’s flight back to Rome was delayed for a couple of hours because of private jets taking up the runway space. In that time, Maradona felt the familiar stirrings of bronca. “In those two hours my mood changed, I recovered my motivation,” he said. “When I got on the plane I was a new man.” Or, rather, the old Maradona.

Brazilians always think everything is tudo bem, tudo legal and they’re all mellow, whereas for us when it’s not tudo bem it’s not cool and fuck the lot of them.

Argentina’s next game was in Naples, Maradona’s spiritual home. And though the tournament was only five days old, it was essentially a knockout game. They were playing the USSR, who had lost their first game 2-0 to Romania. A second defeat for either team would leave them needing snookers to stay in the tournament.

The Argentina keeper Nery Pumpido suffered a broken leg in the first few minutes, which ruled him out of the rest of the tournament. Before his replacement Sergio Goycoechea had touched the ball, Maradona played goalkeeper by blocking Oleg Kuznetsov’s header on the line with his right hand. The Swedish referee Erik Frederiksson was five yards away with an uninterrupted view, but he was blinded by Maradona's aura. “The Russians piled on top of the ref all at once, but I’d hypnotised the guy,” said Maradona. “I’d hypnotised him!”

Argentina went on to win 2-0, and though Maradona had another subdued game, he was again the main topic of conversation after the match.

Before the final group game against Romania, Maradona suffered a bad knee injury in training. In his autobiography, he recalls hugging his wife Claudia with one hand while holding an icepack to his knee with the other. With Pumpido’s broken leg, the absence of Valdano and the overwhelming external hostility, Maradona knew that for Argentina to win the tournament in the flamboyant manner of 1986 was impossible. “It felt like we were in an obstacle race more than a World Cup,” he said. “To ask us to play well, in those circumstances, was asking too much. We had to win any way we could.”

Before the tournament Maradona thought Italia 90 would be his peak. “I was 29,” he said. “Neither young nor old: an expert” But his body and mind had been through so much since he made his debut for the Argentinos Juniors at the age of 15 that in football terms he was an old man. The list of injuries kept increasing – toe, knee and then his ankle, which took a whack in the first half of the Romania game and immediately started to swell. At half-time, Maradona overheard the team doctor tell Bilardo that he needed to be substituted, and aggressively disabused them of the notion. (This, at least, is Maradona’s version. After the game Bilardo said Maradona was in so much pain at half-time that he asked to be substituted, but then changed his mind and said he would play “if it killed him”.)

Argentina sneaked into the last 16 as one of the best third-placed qualifiers after a 1-1 draw with Romania. Maradona was outplayed by Gheorghe Hagi, known as the Maradona of the Carpathians, though he still made Argentina’s goal with a superb corner that was headed in by Pedro Monzon. Hagi and Marius Lacatus were both booked for fouls on Maradona in the first 10 minutes - and they were Romania’s creative players. While there were times when he exaggerated contact, he was still kicked around like no other player. Fifa statistics showed that Maradona was fouled 28 times in the first three group games, 13 more than anyone else, and 53 times in the whole tournament. This was the last World Cup before football started to clamp down on the legitimised thuggery of defenders.

Whether because of injury, form or both, Maradona wasn’t playing well and Argentina, the champions, had only sneaked through as one of the best third-placed teams. “I was fuming... we couldn’t be such pichis, such babies, that we could give our prestige away like it was nothing,” he said. “If I’d said anything at that point I would have had to badmouth half the team, and that wasn’t my style. It also wasn’t my style to say ‘I’m satisfied’ because that would have been hypocrisy. Bollocks was I satisfied! It was better to keep my anger inside and start thinking about our next match.”

Had they won the group, as most expected before the tournament, they would have faced Colombia in the next round. Had they finished second, it would have been the Republic of Ireland. But third place meant the winners of Group C: Brazil.

Sunday 24 June 1990 was a day of savage, exquisite jeopardy. There were two matches in the last 16 of the World Cup: Brazil v Argentina and West Germany v Holland. They are two of the biggest rivalries in football, so defeat in a World Cup match would be unthinkable at any stage. But in the last 16, when the tournament had barely started, it would be an eternal humiliation.

Maradona’s ankle, injured against Romania, starred to swell grotesquely over the next few days. Many people suggested he was missing training and exaggerating his injury to excuse his subdued performances. His personal trainer Signorini advised him to sit and watch a training session in flip-flops, so that the assembled journalists could see he was telling the truth. "I could feel everyone’s eyes fixed on my ankle like knives," said Maradona. When they asked him whether he would be fit to face Brazil, Maradona said, “Like this or in a cast, but I’m playing.”

The day before the game, Maradona could barely walk to the toilet, never mind kick a ball. The medical diagnosis was ominous: “Strong direct trauma, extending to the fibula, affecting a tendon.” But he was confident a combination of adrenaline, painkilling injections and bronca would get him through the Brazil game. When the team doctor refused to give him any more injections, Maradona did it himself. His mood became even more defiant when he found out that the Argentina Football Association had already arranged flights home for the day after the match. They told him it was standard practice, something all teams did before every knockout game, but Maradona wasn’t listening. It was another slight, another source of bronca.

It was rapidly becoming Maradona against the world. In All Played Out, his seminal book on Italia 90, Pete Davies conveys the hostility of the Turin crowd towards Maradona before the game. “Inside the stadium the intensity, the deep ferocity of the booing and shrieking that greeted the announcement of Maradona’s name was in a whole new league,” Davies wrote. “It was a torrent of relentless hatred, every piercing whistle meant right from the bottom of every raging and envious heart … it was too much. He is, after all, a footballer – not Lucifer.”

For most of the game, Argentina were totally outplayed. Brazil hit the woodwork three times and missed other chances. But their inability to score left them vulnerable to one of the World Cup’s great stings. With 10 minutes to go, Maradona picked up the ball on the halfway line. There were six Brazilian players between him and the goal, and another three right behind him. At first they seemed almost amused by his attempt to roll back the years and take them all on. But when he broke the first rank of three defenders, blind panic set in. Two defenders were so flustered that they ran into each other, and nobody followed Claudio Caniggia, who ran onto Maradona’s pass to score. The only other time Maradona met Brazil at the World Cup, in 1982, he was sent off for sticking his studs into Batista’s groin. This time he did it to an entire nation.

"Brazil have sold the world this idea that they’re the only ones capable of the jogo bonito, of playing beautifully... bollocks!" said Maradona in his autobiography. "We can also do the jogo bonito, we just don’t know how to sell it. Brazilians always think everything is tudo bem, tudo legal and they’re all mellow, whereas for us when it’s not tudo bem it’s not cool and fuck the lot of them. We stop people short and knock them out one by one. That’s how we are and I don’t have a problem with that. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Brazilian way of life. I like them, but in football, I want to beat them to the death.”

Maradona’s creation of Caniggia’s goal was his only moment of genius in the entire tournament, the one thing that could have come from Mexico 86. Yet even then there was a difference. His highlights in Mexico were smooth, elegant, even poetic; the assist for Caniggia, though undeniably brilliant, was more laboured as he struggled past defenders and resisted their attempts to stop him. By the time he played the pass to Caniggia, he was in the process of falling over because of the pressure on his shoulder from the Brazil defender Ricardo Rocha.

In Italy, Maradona's willpower was his greatest weapon. He was an endless source of mental strength and defiance from which his teammates could draw, and he symbolised the warped defiance of a team who were determined to retain their trophy by foul means or fouler.

Argentina's victory later became the subject of what was called the Holy Water Scandal. It was alleged that, during a break in play in the first half, one of the Argentina backroom staff gave Branco, the Brazil left-back, a water bottle laced with tranquilisers. Branco felt dizzy and lifeless. The Argentina coach Bilardo has never really bothered to deny the accusation, and in 2004, Maradona almost exploded with laughter as he discussed the incident on a national TV show.

Maradona and Argentina moved on to face Yugoslavia in the quarter-final. “If I can stop him, we can win the game," said Refik Sabanadzovic, who was tasked with marking Maradona. "I respect him but I am not afraid.” As it turned out, Maradona stopped Sabanadzovic from playing - by getting him sent off.

After half an hour, with Sabanadzovic already on a yellow card for not retreating at a free-kick, Maradona lost him with a thrilling turn and a sudden explosion towards the penalty area. Sabanadzovic brought Maradona down from behind and was given a second yellow card.

The ten men of Yugoslavia still outplayed a desperate Argentina, and the match went to penalties after a goalless draw. When Maradona’s feeble penalty was saved by Tomislav Ivkovic - who had also saved from Maradona in a shootout in the Uefa Cup the previous September - Argentina were in trouble. When Pedro Troglio missed the next one, they were on the brink. But the stand-in keeper Goycoechea saved consecutive penalties to put them through to the mother of all semi-finals: Italy, in Naples.

“The situation is delicious,” wrote David Lacey in the Guardian, “but the continued presence of Argentina carries a bad odour.” By now they were the pariahs of Italia 90. The day before the game, Maradona addressed the press with his usual diplomacy. “I don’t like the fact that now everyone is asking the Neapolitans to be Italian and to support their national team. Naples has always been marginalised by the rest of Italy. It is a city that suffers the most unfair racism... In the whole of Italy, Neapolitans have always been called terremotati (earthquake victims), terroni (people from the land), but in these moments, they’re Italian. Before, they were African, now they’re the best people in Italy.”

Almost everyone expected Argentina to be well beaten by Italy, who had won every game without conceding a goal. Before the game, Maradona strutted onto the field like a man who knew something that nobody else did. Maybe he sensed that Argentina were going to turn in their one quality performance of Italia 90. “We were calm, calmer than for any other game in the tournament,” he said. “Perhaps it was because nobody gave us a chance.” From the start they were excellent: confident in possession and disarmingly sportsmanlike, at least until Ricardo Giusti was sent off in extra time for an off-the-ball incident with Roberto Baggio.

Toto Schillaci gave Italy the lead but Caniggia’s 67th-minute equaliser, after a misjudgement from the Italy keeper Walter Zenga that will haunt him forever, was the least Argentina deserved. Maradona was both inspirational leader and conductor; his passing from deeper positions was central to Argentina’s improved performance.

And while the crowd was still largely pro-Italy - a famous banner read “Maradona, Napoli loves you, but Italy is our country” - there was a strange, nervous atmosphere. Argentina’s anthem was not booed, and there was nothing like the fervour of Italy’s previous games in Rome. “If we’d remained in Rome, we wouldn’t have lost,” said the Italian defender Giuseppe Bergomi in World in Motion. “Maradona was clever in creating that atmosphere.”

The match became a slow-burning horror as all of Italy started to realise the unthinkable could happen. Despite Giusti’s sending-off, the game drifted to another penalty shoot-out. It was time for Maradona’s ultimate violation.

In his autobiography, Maradona speaks frequently of vaccinating his most hated opponents, and he’s not talking as a qualified medical practitioner. The closest translation is “to fuck”. He had already vaccinated Brazil in style in the second round; now it was Italy’s turn.

After the first three penalties on both sides were scored, Roberto Donadoni’s kick was saved by Goycoechea. Maradona strolled forward, knowing if he scored Argentina would be at match point. What Maradona lacks in marbles, he more than makes up in stones. He repeated his Yugoslavia penalty, sidefooting the ball slowly to his left. It was the mother of all gambles, but it paid off as Zenga dived the wrong way. For the conceit to work, for the vaccination to be its most powerful and painful, he had to repeat the Yugoslavia penalty and risk the humiliation of it being saved again.

Maradona set off on a deliberately excessive, provocative celebration, cavorting with members of the Argentina party on the touchline. The penalty shoot-out wasn’t even over. It was the equivalent of laughing in the middle of a funeral. Moments later, Aldo Serena’s penalty was saved and Argentina were through to the final. Maradona had taken on the whole of Italy and won. At the end of the game, on the steps of the tunnel, he leant against a wall, grabbed his shirt in a clenched fist, started to kiss it and shouted “I love you! I love you!”

Argentina would be even weaker in the final due to the suspension of Giusti and particularly Caniggia, who received his second yellow card of the tournament for an absurd and unnecessary handball. But in that moment, in the dressing-room in Naples, tomorrow was irrelevant. “There we were, happier than anyone else in the history of the world, in spite of everything," said Maradona. "We, the motley crew, the persecuted, had made it into the final.”

The fact they had knocked out Italy made them even less popular, if that was possible, in the lead-up to the final against West Germany. “We were cannon fodder because we’d knocked Italy out of the World Cup,” said Maradona. “They weren’t going to forgive us for that. We’d buggered up the final the business interests wanted: Italy v West Germany. And if that wasn’t enough, we’d knocked Brazil out!”

Maradona was certain that the win over Italy was the start of a vendetta against him. In March 1991, he failed a drug test and was banned from football for 18 months. He never played in Italy again.

The ideal build up to a World Cup final is calm and tranquil. Three days before the final, Maradona watched as his brother-in-law and some of Argentina’s security guards were involved in a punch-up with the police at the Argentina training camp. Maradona’s brother had taken two of Maradona’s daughters out for a drive in his Ferrari, during which he was stopped for speeding. They asked to see his papers, which he had left at the training camp, so they followed him back to Trigoria. “They [the police] arrived, but with the wrong attitude,” said Maradona, “and all hell broke loose.”

The next morning, Maradona looked out of his bedroom window to see that the Argentina flag – which had stood alongside those of AS Roma and Italy – had been ripped up. He dragged the media along for an impromptu press conference, during which he let rip at everyone from the security guards to the Roma president Dino Viola. “He doesn’t like us and he promised to make our lives quite impossible … He comes periodically to check up on us. He comes to see if the chairs are still there, if we’ve broken any glasses, if the grass on the pitch has been stamped on too hard. He treats us like gypsies.”

Maradona found enemies and irritants wherever he turned. In the shower the day before the game, Julio Grondona, the president of the Argentina Football Association, told Maradona they had done well to reach the final and that it was over. “We’re done, Diego,” he said, as Maradona’s temperature rose exponentially.

Before the final, Argentina’s anthem was booed with unprecedented gusto by the crowd in Rome. When Maradona appeared on the giant screen, it became even more vicious. Having listened to the jeering and whistling throughout the tournament, Maradona decided he deserved the right of reply. Knowing he was still on the big screen, he slowly mouthed “Hijos de puta” (“sons of bitches”), and then did it again in case anyone missed it the first time round. It was a message to the crowd in Rome, but the watching millions on TV were equally welcome to consider it.

Years later, in his book Touched by God, Maradona said that he played the final with a torn hamstring. While all his other injuries in the World Cup are undisputed, this one has the whiff of exaggeration, if only because it would defy medical science to run for 90 minutes with a torn hamstring. Maradona's story is that Bilardo suggested they hold him back until the second half. “You wait until the second half to put me in,” Maradona said, “and I’ll kick the shit out of you!”

Whether he had a torn hamstring or not, Maradona still had all his pre-existing injuries and was marked out of the game by the underrated Guido Buchwald. With Caniggia also absent, it soon become clear that Argentina’s sole ambition was to get to another penalty shoot-out. The match was settled by a penalty – but it was in normal time, with five minutes to go, when Andreas Brehme scored the winner for West Germany. It was a dubious penalty, awarded for a challenge on Rudi Voller by Roberto Sensini, and Maradona has always insisted it was a fix. He declined to shake the Fifa president’s Joao Havelange’s hand at the end of the game “because I felt robbed and I felt he had something to do with that”.

“Germany were the better team, sure,” said Maradona. “But we were dignified. Very dignified.” So dignified that they had two players sent off, the first time that had happened in a World Cup final. Monzon went for a high tackle on Jurgen Klinsmann; Gustavo Dezotti walked for grabbing Jurgen Kohler round the neck and dragging him to the floor as the game descended into anarchy after West Germany’s goal.

At one point it looked like one of the Argentina players would punch the referee. It seemed Maradona was one of the few trying to keep the peace, though he was still booked. As the referee waved the yellow card theatrically, Maradona walked away in despair. He ended the match weeping openly as the realisation hit home that the World Cup had finally been prised from his hands.

Most of the football world rejoiced in Maradona’s tears and Argentina’s defeat. It’s easy to think now of them as the pantomime villains of Italia 90 but at the time it was no pantomime: they were truly detested by millions of people. With a respectful nod to the West Germany side of 1982, Argentina 1990 are the greatest villains the World Cup has ever had. Yet these was something weirdly admirable about the way a limited side fought to hold on to their World Cup crown. They went about as quietly as Tony Montana at the end of Scarface.

Maradona had promised his three-year-old daughter Dalma that he would bring home the World Cup. When he presented her with a runner’s up medal, she threw it back at him. “I swear I cried more then than I had at the stadium. How could I explain to her what it felt like to have been robbed? I didn’t celebrate that silver medal, not ever.”

He may not have celebrated it but the maelstrom of Italia 90 was an essential part of his legend. That month in Italy - half opera, half tawdry melodrama – gave an even greater insight into Maradona's character than the mostly pristine glory of 1986. You don’t always have to win to show you’re a winner.

An earlier version of this article was published in Josimar