Napoli and Diego Maradona, the enduring bond | Football News – Times of India

It’s literally raining stars in Naples. Social media is flooded with such clips, one even shows celebrating Nepolitans ‘driving’ an illuminated boat through the city’s streets. It could well be a scene from Hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2021 growing up film which is abundant with such allegories about the city. Because that’s what it is all about, a city’s coming of age, like Naples’ own late on Thursday, once again after 33 long years.
When it had last happened, or probably the first time in 1986-87, they thronged the local cemetery telling their dead that they did not know what they had missed. This time, they knew who they would be invoking.
For those who seek all their ready truths on Netflix today but are equally curious about the madness revolving around Napoli’s Scudetto victory, now would be a good time to revisit Hand of God to get your answers.

‘E stata la mano di Dio’ is not a footballing film. It is not even a film about Maradona. Instead, it goes deep with the idea of the Argentinian footballer and his almost-mythical hold over the southern Italian city in the 1980s in the haunting, semi-autobiographical film by the Italian master, that is both an ode to Fellini as it is to the enduring impact that Maradona carries.
Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli and its triumph in Italy, then cannot be seen without the prism of Maradona’s overarching influence over the club, nor can it be overstated enough. No one footballer has defined the ethos of a city as Maradona and Naples, no city or culture more thankful to a single footballing hero as Naples is.
“Diego Maradona never left Naples and never left Italy,” writes Pippo Russo in his essay, ‘Maradona and Italy: The Rise and Fall of the Man on His Own.’
Remember, Italy in the 1980s was the world’s toughest football league. It still stands as the automatic yardstick for a league’s toughness. In that, Maradona, when he arrived at Napoli in 1984, welcomed by 75,000 at the stadium, was readily hailed as the saviour angel descending upon the dusty, forgotten city in Italy’s discarded
south.

Like its city, SSC Napoli was a club without hope, or favour. What followed is often regarded as modern football’s greatest underdog triumph.
“Italian culture has never ceased to deal with this presence, which morphed into a myth when Maradona was alive, and has become even more legendary since his passing,” explains Russo.
Maradona’s presence both as a spiritual metaphor and as a living character in Naples has invariably figured in Italian discourse, as often depicted in Sorrentino’s films.
In 2014, the filmmaker had remembered to thank both Fellini and Maradona for being an inspiration in his Oscar acceptance speech for best foreign film — La Grande
Bellezza.

In Youth, the idea of the wasted Argentinian genius was portrayed in the 2015 passage of time film, with lookalike actor Roly Serrano playing an unexplained podgy, overweight figure who could be anybody but is nobody but Maradona. So convincing was Serrano’s likeness (and so believable Maradona’s descent) that CGI clips of
him juggling a tennis ball from the film went viral during the pandemic with people readily mistaking him for Maradona during lockdown.
Given his own famous excesses, no one gave a second thought that it wasn’t him. It only added to the legend when the real Maradona died a few months later. In Hand of God, the idea that Maradona is Naples’ guardian angel plays out when the teenaged protagonist Fabietto chooses to stay back and attend Napoli hosting Empoli, rather than accompany his parents to their new home in the hills, where they eventually die of carbon monoxide poisoning the same evening.
While grieving, an uncle reminds him how it was Maradona who saved him.
“It was the hand of God,” he exclaims. The most poignant connect is when all of Naples is glued to their TV sets in the summer of ’86, the commentary rising over the working-class apartments as Maradona’s Argentina win the World Cup.

(AI image)
The Italian title is still yet to come, yet they celebrate him as one of their own. On Thursday, Naples was once again celebrating, this time something of their own. And they were being joined by those foolish football romantics from all over the world, coming from across the seas, arriving in their illuminated boats that could be ‘driven’ on land, air and water, something straight out of a Sorrentino labour of love.