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| Diego Maradona (File photo) |
"Diego, fancy coming over here? It's a great life and you can play with no worries."
Carlos Bilardo's offer to Diego Maradona to leave Napoli and join his new venture in Sevilla was typically blunt and to the point.
The world's greatest football talent takes some time to think, but ultimately accepts his former mentor's proposal. In truth, Diego had few options.
The year was 1992. Maradona's love affair with Napoli had started to turn sour during the World Cup two years earlier when the Naples crowd admitted, "The people love you, but Italy is our country" as Argentina fought for a place in the final. The coup de grace was delivered on March 17, 1991, when the No. 10 tested positive for cocaine and received a 15-month ban from all football activities.
Diego's Italian romance was over, and a new adventure beckoned, a return to the country he had hypnotised with a short but eventful spell at Barcelona a decade before.
That brief telephone call in July 1992 with Bilardo, the man who had taken the Albiceleste to two consecutive World Cup finals with Maradona the captain and standard-bearer, opened the door to a new start for the troubled superstar.
The Sevilla board was wary, but El Narigon was adamant. "If Diego doesn't come, I'm packing my bags and leaving for Buenos Aires right now," he warned.
The coach won his stand-off. Maradona bade farewell to La Dolce Vita and headed for the land of Flamenco. He fell in love with the house of 'Espartaco', the iconic Spanish bull-fighter, and rented the property soon after arriving.
"I'm no longer No. 1 in the world, I am down at 10,000, but I have the same dreams as I did when I was a kid of 15," he told fans in a raucous presentation at the Estadio Pizjuan.
Diego's first game was a friendly arranged against Bayern Munich. There was no lack of talent in that Sevilla team, featuring Diego Simeone, Davor Suker and Nacho Conte to name just three, but all eyes were on Diego as he completed the 90 minutes, hit the bar from a free-kick and set up the Croatian hitman for a goal. His official debut ended in defeat and prematurely as he limped off injured in San Mames against his old adversaries Athletic, but glimpses of the old Diego could be seen despite his rather ragged physical shape. After 15 months in the wilderness, his football exile was over.
Just as in 2016, the 1992-3 Sevilla had to contend with two behemoths of the football world in the shape of Barcelona and Real Madrid. Johan Cruyff's Dream Team beat out the Merengue by just one point, taking the title thanks to the capital club's implosion on the final day losing to Tenerife. The Atletico Madrid of 23 years ago were the newly ascendant Deportivo, fired by Bebeto's 29 goals to take third place. Maradona's men, with the Argentine scoring five goals in his 26 Liga appearances that term, finished seventh and missed out on the UEFA Cup by virtue of an inferior head-to-head record against Atletico.
But there were plenty of fireworks along the way. Diego's touch in the middle of the pitch transformed a young Suker, who bounced back from a poor first season in Spain to net 15 goals in La Liga. The Croatian was star-struck. "I used to watch Diego on television as a kid. Suddenly I was sharing breakfast, training and the dressing room with him, it was incredible," he recalled years later. The Maradona effect impacted the entire club, as sparsely-attended training sessions became chaotic affairs with journalists straining to see the genius. "One morning Diego turned up late and in his Ferrari, typical of him. Everyone watching us disappeared and threw themselves at his car."
"I used to pray he would speak to me, that he would say something, until one day he called me," Suker adds.
"He only said to me, 'Davor, I don't want you to look out wide or anything. Just keep your head down and run at the goalkeeper, and I'll put the ball there for you, ready to poke into the net'. Not many players can say that, but he was one of them. If you look at my Sevilla goals they were all like that."
An outrageous display against Real Madrid was perhaps the highlight of Maradona's stay in Seville, as the likes of Fernando Hierro and Robert Prosinecki were bamboozled to a 2-0 defeat in front of a baying Pizjuan. But the old Diego was always there, waiting to self-destruct, and the friction with the equally abrasive Bilardo often boiled over. On one occasion the coach had failed to notice a torrent of abuse from his compatriot after he was pulled off the pitch, but an evening sports bulletin revealed the outburst.
Incensed, Bilardo tracked down Maradona and on opening the door, punched him square in the face. The star's wife Claudia had to separate the two brawlers; later, Diego made his apologies and the pair went out drinking.
"Son of a bitch, your mother is a whore!" The Sevilla dream finally went up in flames in the penultimate match of the 1992-3 season. Monchu had fired the Andalucians into the lead at home to Burgos and, desperate to keep playing, Maradona gave himself three cortisone injections at half-time to kill the pain in his knee. But just eight minutes into the second half a card showing the ominous 10 emerged from the touchline, signalling the end of Diego's evening.
His foul-mouthed tirade echoed crystal clear on television screens across Spain. Without Diego, fuming in the dressing room in solitude having smashed up the team lockers with his bare fists, an 89th minute equaliser spelled the beginning of the end for the team's UEFA Cup hopes. "I'll have to sort this out with Bilardo, if he's man enough," he fired afterwards. An uneasy peace was reached, but with rumours of Sevilla tracking him with private detectives and a body that refused to respond to the demands of the game, his days were numbered.
The final death sentence was uttered by then vice-president Jose Maria del Nido, who considered that the Argentine "was not fit even to play golf". Less than a year after he turned the world of Spanish football upside down for the second time, Maradona was leaving, for his home country, for Newell's Old Boys, for a miraculous recovery in time for 1994 and, finally, for his top-level career to disintegrate one more time.
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