Maradona at the 1986 World Cup: Mexico City
1986 · event
On 22 June 1986 Argentina met England in the quarter final of the World Cup at the Azteca stadium in Mexico City, in front of more than a hundred thousand people and in punishing midday heat. Within four minutes of the second half Diego Maradona scored twice, and the two goals could hardly have been less alike. The first he put into the net with his hand, unseen by the referee and his linesmen. The second he began inside his own half, beating five opponents across sixty metres before rolling the ball past the goalkeeper.
The match carried more than football. Four years earlier Argentina and Britain had fought a war over the Falkland Islands, and many in the crowd and at home read the result through that memory. Maradona later said as much, while insisting that the players had wanted to win a football match above all.
Argentina won two to one and went on to take the tournament, beating West Germany in the final. Maradona was the player of the World Cup and, in the judgement of most who watched it, the reason his team won it. In 2002 a global poll organised by football's world governing body chose the second goal as the goal of the century.
Maradona came from a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Buenos Aires and his later life was troubled and public in equal measure. The two goals in the Azteca remain the compressed version of him, a player who could do something outside the rules and something beyond anyone else's reach in the same afternoon. When he died in 2020, Argentina stopped for three days.