Wednesday 27 October 2010

The definition of greatness

The Beeb ran a debate on their website last week on the hoary old topic of who was the 'greatest', Pele or Maradona. It is, of course, a matter which provokes diametrically opposing views, generally with English and Brazilian people on the one side, and Argentinian and other nationalities on the other. For me, this is not even a matter for debate, unless the debate is about the definition of the word greatness.
Hundreds, hundreds of responses, many of them quite heated, were posted to the Beeb site. Many of those who speak for Maradona point to him 'single-handedly' winning a World Cup and seek to excuse his, how shall we say, indiscretions, as a compensatory by-product of his genius.

I've got a lot of time for the idea that genius often has a flip side which can be self-destructive, whether in great sportsmen, artists, musicians, there's a familiar pattern. However, that does not in itself mean that those destructive impulses can be discounted from the reckoning if you're to weigh one player against another as the Beeb asked.

Maradona may well have played a significant role in Argentina winning a World Cup (though to suggest he won it on his own for them is not only an outrageous exaggeration of his impact but a slur on some high-quality players he had around him in his prime). But Pele won three World Cups. That's three. And Pele was not kicked out of any World Cups for failing a drugs test. Nor did he see fit to cheat in a major game, say, a quarter-final, by punching the ball into the net. A move a clubmate of Maradona at Barcelona, Berndt Schuster, later said he'd seen him practice in training sessions.

A bitter Englishman, still, 24 years on? You bet, I freely admit it. However, and this is what marks the one out from the other for me, in the Venn diagram of greatness, there's no part of the 'ability' circle overlapping another circle marked 'cheating'. If Maradona had done what he did in '86 to, say, Belgium, I'd have felt exactly the same way about it (the concept of his cheating that is - I'd have been considerably less furious from a supporter's point of view, but that's inevitable). His propensity to cheat takes Maradona out of the running completely, in fact. In any list of the greatest players, you can put him some distance behind not only Pele, but Best, Puskas, Di Stefano, Cruyff, Garrincha, Platini, and plenty of others in my book, because, put simply, they weren't cheats.

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