Maradona a genius to rank alongside Pelé

Alan Hansen was making only his second appearance for Scotland when Argentina, the world champions at the time, visited Glasgow with the 18-year-old Diego Maradona in June 1979. The former Scotland defender recalls an unforgettable confrontation with the budding maestro ...

I can honestly say that a week before the game I had never heard of Diego Maradona. I just remember reading the papers on the Saturday morning. You knew all about Kempes and Luque up front because you'd watched them win the World Cup in 1978. According to the previews, they had this wonderkid called Maradona, but every week there is a new football superstar.

More often than not they are a flash in a pan, but after 90 minutes on that hot Saturday afternoon you knew that this was the real deal. This was a kid destined for greatness. He was so quick over five or six yards and had a left foot that, even at 18, already deserved to be described as the wand of a genius.

We weren't a bad team ourselves, with John Wark, Kenny Dalglish, Asa Hartford, but they annihilated us with their passing. They did about 35 consecutive passes at one stage and it got to the point where the Scotland fans were booing us and cheering Maradona.

The first time I got close was after about 15 minutes and I will never forget it. I went to go tight and he passed me. I'm looking at him, looking at the ball, and the next thing I know both are gone. I was shell-shocked. What happened there? Why did it happen?

I don't remember the entire game, or even his goal, particularly well, but I remember that incident vividly. I played a lot of top-level football and people went past me many times. But it is not often you get totally bamboozled by pace and control. And it is very, very rare from an 18-year-old.

I know the game was more famous for his first goal for his country. All I really remember of that is the way he did George Wood in goal. You have this thing in football called “the eyes”, when you throw someone off balance by staring one way and passing or shooting the other. Maradona did Wood with the eyes. He looked like he was going to cross, but instead he whacked it in at the near post. It was a trick that I used, but at 18 he had already perfected it.

If you've had an experience like that, you look out for his name for the rest of his career. You want to see how far he can go. Even on that one performance you would say that Maradona was destined to be right up there with Johan Cruyff and Franz Beckenbauer in the second tier of the very best footballers. The question was whether he could go on to match Pelé at the top and I don't think there is any doubt he did that by the time of the 1986 World Cup.

If the main attributes for a footballer are strength, pace and ability, he was a ten in every one. You tell me another player who has that.

He was tough. You hear stories about people going through the back of him in the first five minutes and he would just jump up and get on with it. I remember Phil Neal [the former Liverpool and England full back] telling me that he had done exactly that to Maradona in a game at Wembley, two feet right through the back of his legs. Maradona just got straight up. Indestructible.

I find it hard to forget about the drugs and the controversy. I think you have to see the whole of any career and there is no doubt he let himself down by the end. But if you ask any Scotland supporter who was there that afternoon, they will tell you that it was a privilege to see him. It was one of those days when the first thing you said when you walked off was: “Did you see that?” My brother was there and he said exactly that when I met him for a drink afterwards: “Did you see that?”

Taken from timesonline.co.uk