Maradona takes stage once more

Diego Maradona has made a career out of defying the very God to whom he has dedicated his triumphs and on whom he has called in moments of despair.

By rights, Maradona ought already to have joined "The Beard", as he likes to call Him, in the afterlife.

But the Argentine has shown the same trickery as he demonstrated in his great footballing successes in defying the final curtain call more than once since he hung up his boots.

Maradona survived a heart attack in Uruguay and then a car crash in Cuba last year.

The first incident put him at death's door and led to a drugs rehabilitation course in Cuba he has been following for the past 22 months.

The second occurred near Havana in pouring rain one night in the company of an Argentine alleged to be a drugs supplier and sparked fears that Maradona was back to his worst tricks once again.

Maradona has often consorted with the Devil, not least during the 1994 World Cup finals in the United States.

His personal fitness advisor allegedly took the wrong drugs off a supermarket shelf in Boston and Maradona, after two games, tested positive for an ephedrine cocktail and was kicked out of the tournament and banned for 15 months.

TESTIMONIAL

Maradona will once again defy another devil in the form of middle-aged spread to turn out in a long-overdue testimonial match at the Bombonera (chocolate box) stadium of his favourite team Boca Juniors in Buenos Aires on Saturday.

He has shed more than 10 kilos and recovered from knee surgery he underwent less than a month before the match between Argentina and a team of international all-stars.

"Diego is superhuman. We've had experience handling high-performance athletes, top-level footballers in similar situations, even Olympic medallists, but Maradona's recovery has frankly impressed us," said Colombian surgeon German Alberto Ochoa.

Maradona has managed this kind of physical transformation umpteen times in his career from the day back in his teens when Boca goalkeeper Hugo Gatti, noting the Golden Kid's tendency to easily put on extra kilos, called him Fatty.

The Argentine genius, then playing for his first club Argentinos Juniors, promptly fired four goals past Gatti in their league clash three days later. In 1981 the pair helped Boca to win the league title, Maradona's first.

Thus has the larger-than-life Maradona responded to challenges throughout one of the most colourful sporting careers of the 20th century.

Left out of Argentina's 1978 World Cup squad when he had dreamt of emulating the great Pele by winning the title as a teenager, Maradona led his country's juniors to World Youth Cup victory in Japan the following year.

With the backdrop of Argentina's military defeat by Britain in the Falklands war in 1982, Maradona single-handedly beat the English in their 1986 World Cup quarter-final in Mexico, using fair means and foul.

The punched Hand of God goal that preceded Maradona's brilliant match-winning second strike illustrated the duality of the street urchin turned multi-millionaire.

In 1994, the then club-less apparent has-been put himself through an intensive fitness course and trimmed himself down for a fourth World Cup tournament in the United States.

Then, having raised his fans' hopes of another trophy with two brilliant first-round performances, he plumbed the depths of his and their despair with a doping offence which landed him a second 15-month worldwide ban.

DRUGS

Maradona's first suspension a decade ago when a routine doping test after an Italian Series A match he played for Napoli brought into the open his growing dependency on cocaine.

Having fled back home to Buenos Aires, Maradona was arrested by Argentine police for possession of illegal drugs and his career as a footballer looked finished.

Not so -- in 1992 he came back with Sevilla in Spain and in February 1993 with Argentina, who had won the 1991 Copa America without him, in a friendly against Brazil in Buenos Aires.

But erratic behaviour was already the Maradona norm.

He walked out on Sevilla and was only in the crowd when Argentina were humiliated 5-0 at home by Colombia in a World Cup qualifier in mid-1993.

Chants of "Maradooooo, Maradooooo..." rang around the River Plate stadium, growing louder with each goal Argentina conceded.

As the local media talked of the national team's Maradona-dependency, back he came as saviour for the subsequent two-legged World Cup playoff against Australia that November which Argentina struggled to win by a single goal.

But Maradona, having once again let himself go to seed during the southern hemisphere summer after a five-match new club career with Newell's Old Boys, needed another drastic weight-shedding fitness programme to come back for the World Cup finals in the United States.

Maradona dabbled in coaching with Deportivo Mandiyu and Racing Club while serving his second 15-month ban but made yet another comeback with his beloved Boca Juniors in late 1995.

A two-year spell with Boca riddled with controversies including another alleged positive test for doping ended on October 25 1997, five days before his 37th birthday.

91 CAPS

Maradona, who made 91 appearances for Argentina, should have won closer to 150 caps like his contemporary and friend Lothar Matthaeus of Germany, a rival in consecutive World Cup finals in 1986 and 1990.

But, as well as his intermittent appearances for Argentina after the 1990 World Cup final, he missed 24 straight matches -- the first of Carlos Bilardo's reign -- from the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain to May 1985 when the new coach worked only with locally-based players.

Maradona, during that three-year spell, began his European career with Barcelona and moved on to Napoli, whom he led to Italian league titles in 1987 and 1990.

Bilardo realised that his hopes of winning the World Cup were slim without Maradona so he gave him the captaincy and made him the linchpin of his side.

Argentina's 1986 World Cup triumph was the highest point in Maradona's career, a pinnacle from which he fell hard and fast though not without repeated attempts to stop the tide.

Maradona, now 41, was feted by his country as Argentina's greatest ever player in 1993 and by world body FIFA as one of the two best ever, with Pele, last year. All that remained was a testimonial.