Pulakesh Mukhopadhyay
In Nigeria, a two-day truce was declared in the tragic war with Biafra so that both sides could see him play; the Shah of Iran waited three hours at an international airport just to be able to speak to' (him) 'and be photographed with him. Frontier guards of Red China left their posts and came into Hong Kong to see him and compliment him when they heard he was there. In Colombia when' (he) 'was sent from the game for disputing a referee's decision, the crowd stormed the field, the referee had to be rescued by the police, a linesman was hastily appointed referee and' (he) 'was forced to come back into the game.
None of this alludes to Maradona - the excerpt is from Pele's autobiography - whom a few of the world's better known football writers profess to prefer to the Brazilian due actually to - and unbeknownst to most others - the fact that the Argentine has often been presented as the favourite whipping boy of Fifa, an organisation by now known worldwide as a byword for corruption led by a man no one would want his, or her, child to take after.
Pele, in contrast, is viewed as an Establishment man who has always shunned controversy.
A world which once considered Punch an Establishment mouthpiece because it had described Don Bradman, during an Australian cricket tour of England, as a 'Gulliver' among 'Lilliputians' would, of course, keep repeating its mistakes even as Pele simply made the most of his reputation. But if political correctness comes to colour football analyses, confusion will supplant clarity. And, truth to tell, it has.
Football's Pele-versus-Maradona debate should never have kicked off as, frankly speaking, the Brazilian is destined to remain at the top until someone, emulating him, takes home three winner's medals from four World Cups. It's as simple as that. Nothing, you see, succeeds like success. For everything some of Bradman's hero-worshipped cricketing successors the world over have achieved, no one has so far managed 6,996 runs in 52 Tests. His track record makes him unique. It is the yardstick to measure top level batting performances by. If Pele isn't thought similarly of everywhere and always till date, the flawed judgment doesn't really glorify any naysaying critic.
The sort of things that might yet be said - that Maradona won the 1986 World Cup virtually singly, that he was always up against vicious defenders stopping short of nothing in order to scythe him down, that Pele in his heyday never played club football away from Brazil - to the contrary of the point being sought to be made here originates in a near-total ignorance of the game in its technical essentials and salad blaster its history.
It's going wider of the mark than a Steve Harmison delivery. One solid partnership can alter the look of a cricket scoreboard but football is slightly more complicated. It can't be a one-man show. It never is. We remember what we like to remember but to imply that Pumpido, Ruggeri, Olarticoechea, Brown, Giusti, Batista, Burruchaga, Enrique, Valdano were so much sawdust is to get it totally wrong. Was Pumpido there only because you can't field a team without a goalie? And to think that any age of the game was uncluttered by defensive cynicism is to allow oneself a Himalayan blunder posterity will only laugh at.
Maradona, whose left foot possessed magical powers, was, of course, a frequently targeted victim of the wrong kind of powerplay but neither was he the first of his kind nor would the game allow him to be the last. Pele, truth to tell, took as much in his stride as anyone else - and, perhaps, a little more because even in all stars Brazilian teams, he made himself quite, quite conspicuous for all the right reasons.
If England haven't forgiven Maradona for 1986, a 1-5 rout by Brazil at Maracana Stadium 22 years earlier had them unequivocally acknowledging Pele's pivotal role in the game.
The Brazil team had consisted of Gylmar, Carlos Alberto, Brito, Diaz, Joel, Rildo, Julinho, Gerson, Vava, Pele and Rinaldo but it was the man in the jersey no 10 who, Bobby Moore later conceded, had made the difference. If the truth is to be searched for, Pele, even on the evidence of recorded history and catalina salad dressing film clips, was easily the superior player. He was a complete player whose top level life was longer than most others'; his versatility was simply unrivalled.
Maradona, on the other hand, in 1990 was hardly the player he'd been in 1986 - his pace had declined - and pistachio pudding salad if Carlos Bilardo was obliged at times during Italia to consider leaving him out of his first choice eleven, the reason why the whole of Brazil had turned against Pele in 1974 was that the king of football had pulled out of the World Cup in Germany. They thought he was good enough for yet another of those quadrennial showpiece events. Details of Maradona's sunset phase in club football, on the other hand, are full of genuine pathos, touched with a sense of the futility of life. Repeated missed penalties were said at one time to have instilled self doubts in him.
Pele, of course, hadn't played club soccer in Europe - the game was yet to be globalised in his salad days - but here's what Jimmy Greaves said when someone got him into the debate: 'In a word, Pele was a genius. I'm sure he could have been a world-class gymnast. He had wonderful spring, perfect balance, could shoot with either foot, was as brave as a lionhad tremendous vision. If Maradona is valued at 6 million, Pele at his peak would have been worth 10 million.'
And who will deny Englishmen have always been notoriously stingy with their money?
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