Wonderful article below. Fav extracts copied.
I think it's now or never for Messi to claim to be better by winning the world cup. If he does win it, the arguments in his favour will be compelling. BUT, reading the below and you do wonder what Maradona would have done to defences nowadays....
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/14/lionel-messi-argentina-potential-world-cup
At Mexico 86 Maradona was 25, a year younger than Messi now. Like Messi at Barça Maradona had just had a season of relative consolidation at Napoli. Like Messi, Maradona entered that World Cup with some lingering doubts over his conditioning: for Messi a slight return in the last year of those hamstring injuries and a suggestion of a transformation in his basic role; for Maradona a knee injury that, it was believed, would seriously inhibit his mobility (his total recovery was deemed near-miraculous by some observers). The team Maradona carried to the World Cup final was perhaps not as mediocre as is sometimes made out. It had strong leaders in Jorge Valdano and José Luis Brown, while Jorge Burruchaga provided a hard-running support act to Maradona, as Di María will hope to do this time around.
For all that, this is still a comparison that pretty much goes nowhere. Instead the most interesting parts of any Messi-Maradona head to head are the irreconcilable differences, the changing times that render the exercise skewed. Football has changed a great deal in the past 28 years. Watch any of the many Maradona highlights reels on YouTube and almost every piece of pirouetting left-footed invention involves a feat of rare muscular balance just staying upright while a failed attempt is made to hack him down; or alternatively ends up being curtailed abruptly by a successful one. Maradona’s best moments tended to end in an agonised rub of the shin, whereas Messi’s invariably end with a goal. Football was a different place, an outlaw country where invention was strictly policed and the sight of a player dribbling past world class defenders was hair raising indeed. Plus, of course, there is the tempering of football’s surrounding environment.
To compare Messi and Maradona is a bit like comparing the progress of an Eton scholarship boy and a star pupil at the local borstal. Messi has spent his entire mature footballing life in the company of expert European coaches, sports scientists, teachers, elders, aides, helpers – not to mention Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and the rest. Maradona spent his prime footballing years never far from the company of hucksters, hustlers, egomaniac club owners and licensed and unlicensed drug pushers. He was a self-made troubled superstar, and a genuine Argentinian malandro in spirit. Messi could not have scored his –outrageous, instinctive, utterly bogus – first goal against England in 1986: he’s just not like that (he could have scored the second, though, and in fact does every six months or so, albeit not with Terry Fenwick’s forearm chopping him across the windpipe).
I think it's now or never for Messi to claim to be better by winning the world cup. If he does win it, the arguments in his favour will be compelling. BUT, reading the below and you do wonder what Maradona would have done to defences nowadays....
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/14/lionel-messi-argentina-potential-world-cup
At Mexico 86 Maradona was 25, a year younger than Messi now. Like Messi at Barça Maradona had just had a season of relative consolidation at Napoli. Like Messi, Maradona entered that World Cup with some lingering doubts over his conditioning: for Messi a slight return in the last year of those hamstring injuries and a suggestion of a transformation in his basic role; for Maradona a knee injury that, it was believed, would seriously inhibit his mobility (his total recovery was deemed near-miraculous by some observers). The team Maradona carried to the World Cup final was perhaps not as mediocre as is sometimes made out. It had strong leaders in Jorge Valdano and José Luis Brown, while Jorge Burruchaga provided a hard-running support act to Maradona, as Di María will hope to do this time around.
For all that, this is still a comparison that pretty much goes nowhere. Instead the most interesting parts of any Messi-Maradona head to head are the irreconcilable differences, the changing times that render the exercise skewed. Football has changed a great deal in the past 28 years. Watch any of the many Maradona highlights reels on YouTube and almost every piece of pirouetting left-footed invention involves a feat of rare muscular balance just staying upright while a failed attempt is made to hack him down; or alternatively ends up being curtailed abruptly by a successful one. Maradona’s best moments tended to end in an agonised rub of the shin, whereas Messi’s invariably end with a goal. Football was a different place, an outlaw country where invention was strictly policed and the sight of a player dribbling past world class defenders was hair raising indeed. Plus, of course, there is the tempering of football’s surrounding environment.
To compare Messi and Maradona is a bit like comparing the progress of an Eton scholarship boy and a star pupil at the local borstal. Messi has spent his entire mature footballing life in the company of expert European coaches, sports scientists, teachers, elders, aides, helpers – not to mention Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and the rest. Maradona spent his prime footballing years never far from the company of hucksters, hustlers, egomaniac club owners and licensed and unlicensed drug pushers. He was a self-made troubled superstar, and a genuine Argentinian malandro in spirit. Messi could not have scored his –outrageous, instinctive, utterly bogus – first goal against England in 1986: he’s just not like that (he could have scored the second, though, and in fact does every six months or so, albeit not with Terry Fenwick’s forearm chopping him across the windpipe).
