They were 3-0 up against Liverpool in a semi final 2 years ago, and facing either Ajax or Spurs in the final.
The bookies would have had them as 1/3 favs for the tournament before the semi final second leg. If that’s not “looking like winning it”, you’ve high standards!
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But your reply here even moreso sums up the problem with saturation coverage of modern footballers, versus the imagination and borrowed understandings we used to apply to football players.
I’m 43 years old.
When I started following football, I was left in no uncertain terms that Matthews, Haynes, Wright, Finney, Lofthouse, Charlton, Greaves, Moore and Banks were flawless players. At an international level, Pele, Beckenbauer, Eusebio, Puskas. For never once would you encounter an article that implied anything other than greatness. Total footballers. And I had no inclination nor way to prove otherwise.
It was similar if not quite the same for the outstanding players of my youth. Keegan, Souness, Dalglish, Robson. Internationally it was all about Platini, Zico, Boniek, Scifo and then most of all Maradona. I could count the number of club games I saw any of the international fellas play, while the English and Scottish it was a handful of season. In fairness to that lot they usually seemed to deliver when it mattered. And in Maradona’s case, 1986 trumped anything we’d seen or will see for consistent match winning brilliance.
But the truth is, a lack of club game coverage meant we were largely spared being put through the mediocre and poor games every one of these players put in occasionally; those games when they were little more than bystanders like Maradona was in the 1990 word cup.
And as a result we tend to think of them as playing brilliantly all the time.
Which is exceptionally unfair when you then compare modern players with them. There are people alive who will have seen every single minute of Messi’s career. And they’ll be able to tell you objectively that he has bad games and he has quiet games and that he’s a better player, when surrounded by better players. Actually we don’t need that person. We can all do it ourselves, because most of us will have seen the best path of a hundred Messi games on Tv, and that’s a broad enough sample for anyone to think likewise.
The problem is, Maradona doesn’t have the same sample size. The results are skewed.
