I’ve always believed it difficult for a young Singaporean to reconcile the excesses and geniuses of Diego Maradona. Now I know that we’ve got four ASEAN Football Federation Suzuki Cups, but we have never made it quite so far continentally (much less globally) as to suffer the honour of a Hand of God. Going just by the terms of watching football, I am unimaginably removed from Diego Maradona across space and time. I can, however, tell you what it was like to watch Yaya Sanogo score in the second minute against Borussia Dortmund at 3am Singapore time on 27th November 2014.

The best I can do is watch. And read. Maradona has always featured heavily in any grand retelling of how this game came to waste so much time and effort. Eduardo Galeano’s lyricism and Jonathan Wilson’s razor-sharp histories benefit from Maradona. But this just scratches the surface. The Stadio San Paolo is in the midst of being renamed and Diego Armando Maradona is to be recognised as a patron saint. But then again, he has been compared to so much more. Argentina announced 3 (three) days of national mourning, a sentiment apparently best echoed by the writer Roberto Fontanarosa who reportedly said, “I don’t care what Maradona did with his life, I care about what he did with mine.”

Within mere hours of his death, so much had been said already by people better placed. 1986, Janan Ganesh writes, ‘restored morale to Argentina after the rout in the Falklands and pride to the Mezzogiorno against Piemontese hauteur.’ The metaphor of light, however unspectacular, quietly enchants in Rory Smith’s account on the ‘darkness that could never obscure the light’. And while Jonathan Wilson illuminates Maradona as the ‘fulfilment of a prophecy’, an odd spark of brilliance on Reddit catches my eye. La Bombanera, with its lights off, becomes a physical manifestation of lyricism – Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

We are the products of our time, and I found the outpouring especially incredible for two reasons. Firstly, I think we can agree that football has always been fickle – but our age of social media seems to have amplified that. Twitter is rife with users racing to engage in revisionism and romanticism of players we absolutely did not rate.

And we might then think about the context of COVID-19 today – where something just feels off. Amid questions early on of who should receive testing and how we should ration the limited and precious capabilities of strained healthcare systems globally, it seems incongruous that top tier footballers continue to jet around with the comfort of abundant testing. Rather than a turning point, football’s response has appeared almost symptomatic. This has prompted angry responses from Messrs Guardiola, Klopp and Wilder, but also given rise to the shining beacon of hope that is Marcus Rashford. Though in the case of the latter, a friend summed it up best by wondering: “quite how feeding impoverished children could be considered controversial is absolutely beyond reason.”

16 year old me would have naïvely said that the game was just a microcosm of the way the world works, but with the benefit of some university education I am now empowered to say ‘there’s a little bit more to it than that’. Amidst its painful ironies, there is a simple and fundamental joy about football that Maradona embodied. And maybe that’s what our apparently inbuilt desire of idolatry is for. It betrays our anxieties as much as the people in the 10th Century did when they feared Judgement Day, but it also galvanises and gives us a warped form of hope.

And as always, a little bit of Arsène to make sense of it all: “We’d all love to be like him, even though we’d have to forget every stupid thing he did in his life, because he is the way he is, he is a whole, he is genuine.” We might wonder if the excesses of Maradona were worth the joy of watching Diego, but that seems to miss the point. He grifted and he grafted and he spun and he sunk, but we’d do well to remember Diego for the person that he was.