Maradona Wants to Coach Argentina? Wait…Wha…Huh?!?

Before we get into the…um…meat of this story, which is the fact that Diego Maradona wants to be the new coach of Argentina… Well, first, allow me to bring you this delightful little tidbit, which Daryl discovered today as we were reseearching this post. From an article in The Sun on strange thefts:

“Cops in Argentina were keen to put the boot in after a thief stole football star Maradona’s fake willy from a museum in 2003. The former international – famous for his ‘hand of god’ incident against England – used the trick todger to palm-off drug-test officials at Italian club Napoli. He would pump out “clean” urine to hide his coke habit.”

Which leads us to the truly important questions: How did this work? What did the thieves do with this item? And most importantly, why did The Sun not include pictures?*

But this is irrelevant to our real story today, which is about the future of the Argentinian futbol team. For those of you who weren’t paying attention last week, little Chile managed to take down Argentina, 1-0 — their first win over the Argies in thirty-five years, and their first World Cup win over them in history. This was such a humiliation to the Argentinians that coach Alfio Basile resigned in disgrace.

And guess who wants to replace him? None other than Argentina’s most popular player ever, Diego Maradona, who wants the job despite having no high-profile coaching successes on his resume.

“I’ll fight until the end. The one making the final decision is Julio Grondona (AFA president) and no one is going to change that,” Maradona said in an interview with Argentina radio station Del Plata before flying to Georgia to attend a showbol match.

Regarding his short career as coach, Maradona said he’s not worried because “you grow as you walk the path. Tactics is someting relatively important if you have the players, and Argentina have all of them.”

This has caused other Argentinians, such as Maradona’s former teammate Jorge Valdano, to come out and say that this really wouldn’t be such a great idea.

“Diego has no experience, apart from sporadic and short interventions,” Valdano, Maradona’s team mate in the 1986 World Cup side, told the TyC cable sports channel.

Maradona had two brief stints as coach of Deportivo Mandiyu and then Racing Club in the mid-1990s.

“I have the maximum respect for him but he hasn’t done any background work, which is a basic necessity for coaches who aspire to the highest level. It appears risky to me. It’s difficult to land on your feet as coach of the national team.”

Exactly. Argentina is currently sitting third of the ten teams in CONMEBOL’s (South America’s) World Cup qualifying group. The top four countries automatically qualify, and the #5 team gets to play in a playoff with a CONCACAF team, so the chances of Argentina not making it to World Cup 2010 are slim. But Argentina currently has only 16 points in ten games. The #6 team, Ecuador, has 12. That’s not a lot of cushion. Argentina can’t afford any more upset losses. Which means they probably can’t afford to take a chance on Maradona, regardless of how popular he is with the Argentinian masses.

*My co-blogger Chris comes to the rescue here. He says that the name of the product is “The Whizzinator,” and he invited Daryl and me to google it. I will not spoil the surprise for you, except to include these descriptors: “Undetectable! Foolproof! Re-Usable!”

P.P.S. Sadly, no, this is not the oddest conversation that Chris, Daryl and I have ever had.

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