Argentina have appointed as their coach a former cocaine addict who prefers to watch football matches waving his shirt over his head rather than thinking logically in a dugout. A man who has enough trouble organizing his own life, never mind meeting the needs of a squad. He once kept his biographer waiting 24 hours in an hotel lobby (the writer never budged from the sofa). And he twice invited me to Buenos Aires for an interview and did not show up.

This is a man who would not do a commercial for Viagra, unlike Pelé, but would make sure he was in attractive company and then swallow the whole packet. A man who does everything to excess, be it bad timekeeping, feuds, drugs, sublime skills; and whose international coaching regime, which begins against Scotland in Glasgow today evening, is surely doomed as a result.
It is a crackers appointment, but that does not mean it is inexplicable, nor that the world does not wish him well. Look at it another way: putting Maradona in charge makes more sense to the Argentineans than turning to a Swede or an Italian -- as, in our desperation, the English have done. The national team are, after all, a representative side and no one symbolizes Argentine football or its supporting public better than Maradona.
At the last World Cup, he wore the blue-and-white shirt to every game and was spotted cowering behind his seat during tense moments. It is as “the people's player” that he wants to be remembered, the man “taken out of Villa Fiorito and given a kick in the a*** that landed me on top of the world -- but still wearing the same pair of trousers as always, my only ones, the ones I wore in winter and summer”.
We write so often about South American street urchins turned brilliant footballers that it begins to sound clichéd. But you journey into Villa Fiorito, where Maradona was raised, and you come to understand the real hardship behind that throwaway line.
The first challenge is to get there. A dozen taxi drivers in Buenos Aires refused point blank. “You supply the tank and I will think about it,” one joked, before driving off. People flee Fiorito, they don't ask to be taken into this dangerous slum.
The Riachuelo River, an industrial sewer, acts like a moat, cutting it off from Buenos Aires. But eventually we found a driver willing to take us on the half-hour journey along Route 3, albeit taking the precaution of stopping at the police station to pick up an armed escort. “Better to be safe,” Omar Bravo, our driver, said, speaking from experience. He had been held up twice in Fiorito by armed robbers.
Omar spends his spare time helping out in a centre for recovering drug addicts. “The barrio (neighborhood) is very poor and troubled. But you can still love a place full of robbers, addicts and paupers,” he said. He knew every twist and turn of Fiorito's potholed streets and, more importantly, he knew when it was wise to get out of the car for a wander. “Don't take a picture of that house, whatever you do -- drug dealer,” he barked.
There are more deprived areas of Buenos Aires -- Fort Apache, for example, the slum that was once home to Carlos Tévez, the Manchester United forward -- and there is a main street in Fiorito with a pizza parlour and a couple of shops. But it was in the warren of shabby backstreets that Maradona grew up.
Stray dogs wander around looking for scraps. Rag-and-bone men trot past on horse-drawn carts. “It wasn't easy, eh? Nothing was easy,” Maradona once said of this place. “If it was possible to eat, people ate. And if it wasn't, they didn't.” At least the Maradonas had a steady income, with Don Diego, his father, employed at the nearby bonemeal factory as a crusher.
Heading along Mario Bravo, weaving between the holes and ruts in the road, we finally turned the corner into Azamor. A couple of kids were kicking a football around the bumpy street -- “potrero”, or waste-ground children, like Maradona himself.
And then we were in front of 523, the single-storey building that is mostly unchanged since Maradona's day. This is where Maradona, now 48, spent his childhood, although no plaque marks that historic fact.
The shack still has three small rooms - one for cooking and working, a bedroom for the adults and another that housed Maradona and his seven siblings. And it still has the leaks in the roof that required the beds to be moved to avoid the rainfall.
In Maradona's day, that deluge was the only running water. He had to walk down the street to a communal tap to fill a bucket for drinking and washing. Carrying the heavy load helped to build his upper-body strength; useful for holding off malevolent opponents in the years to come.
The front of the house used to be kept clear, but now it is covered in great heaps of trash. The present residents trawl around the bins in Buenos Aires, collecting drink bottles and tin cans to exchange for money. They are grateful for a few extra pesos, although no bribe will get the photographer inside.
From this shack, it is a couple of minutes' drive to Fiorito's football pitches - although, were it not for the posts sticking out of the bare ground, you would think it was just wasteland.
A woman crosses on her bicycle, dust rising from the wheels, while old men sit in La Cabaña de Tony, sipping cold drinks and watching old jalopies slowly go by. It is strange to ponder the millions of pounds poured into English football academies and to see the scrubland that produced the world's greatest talent.
It is at the pitches where you find the only small proof that Maradona played in these streets. An old schoolfriend, Goyo Carrizo, has erected a sign hailing “38 Years of History -- 1967 to 2005”. Maradona's first proper match was here in 1967 and 2005 was when Carrizo decided that someone in Fiorito should pause from eking out a living to mark this site.
Along with Maradona, Carrizo was selected for trials by Argentinos Juniors as a kid. But he managed only a short career as a professional and was forced by poverty back to Fiorito. His friend went on to meet kings and popes, to lift the World Cup and to be coach of his country.
On the morning we visited, Carrizo was out on the pitch having a kickaround with his son. They interrupted the game to come over and make introductions. The boy's name? Diego Armando, of course. Maradona's appointment may well be crackers, but it makes sense to some.
(Source: The Times)