Maradona e a natureza argentina

"In South America it is sometimes said, or alleged, that the key to the character of the Argentinians can be found in their assessment of Maradona's two goals in the 1986 World Cup. For the first goal, christened "the Hand of God" by its scorer, Maradona dramatically levitated for a ballooned cross and punched the ball home with a cleverly concealed left fist. But the second goal, which came minutes later, was the one that [England manager] Bobby Robson called the "bloody miracle": collecting a pass from his own penalty area, Maradona, as if in expiation, put his head down and seemed to burrow his way through the entire England team before flooring Shilton with a dummy and stroking the ball into the net. Well, in Argentina, the first goal, and not the second, is the one they really like.
For the Argie macho (or so this slanderous generalisation runs) foul means are incomparably more satisfying than fair. "It's the same in government and business. They don't just tolerate corruption. They worship corruption." It is a proclivity that extends into the sexual arena, with the high value assigned, in macho circles, to heterosexual sodomy - something noticed in his travels by VS Naipaul and, more surprisingly (this was in the 1920s), by Jorge Luis Borges, who thought it the essence of the cult of "taking advantage". In Maradona's personal lexicon, the same word does duty for both goalscoring and fornication. (The word is "vaccinate": an odd choice, given that Diego was so often the pre-match recipient of the six-inch painkiller needle, driven into the inflamed kneecap, the supporating big toe.) By this logic, the second goal against England was a languid, erotic epiphany; the first was a knee-trembler in a back alley; and each has its points. More broadly, there is in this culture a humiliation, an abjectness, in always playing by the rules."

Martim Amis