Diego Maradona's tragedy was told in many details this week, but none was as striking as the contents in a single photograph.
The sensitive media carried only a blurred version, but within the limits of a room crowded in Buenos Aires on Tuesday, at the beginning of a test that has been more than four years to arrive, the image was exhibited in its crudest and most graphic form.
He was printed on an A3 size card, which shows Maradona dead in his bed in a pair of blue shorts, his greatly swollen stomach exposed by a black shirt that he had mounted on his chest, his arms stretched on his sides. There was no football god in that image, just an distressing visual and without ornaments of how his body was discovered in a rented house shortly after midday of November 25, 2020.
The prosecutor, Patricio Ferrari, had his reasons to share it, of course.
And then he raised the card to see a panel of judges, a few meters from the three daughters of Maradona and his ex -wife, before reaching the crux of his opening comments: 'This is how he died. Those who say they didn't notice what was happening to Diego are lying to you on the face. It was clear.
It is not that something was completely clear with a man whose gifts could only coincide with his self-sabotage capacity.
Diego Maradona's tragedy was counted in graphic detail during a trial in Buenos Aires
Dr. Leopoldo Luque (in the photo with Maradona in November 2020, a few days before his death) is one of the seven members of the Legend Medical Team that was judged
His medical team has been accused of criminal negligence and faces homicide charges with possible intention of the attention he received in the days prior to his death (in the photo: Luque, Centro)
Maradona's death, who won the World Cup in 1986, threw Argentina in mourning
But for Ferrari, and much of Maradona's family, there is no ambiguity in this matter. For them, the lines are straight and lead directly from the death of a footballer at the age of 60 until his argument that was caused by a catastrophic medical negligence. Hence the trial of seven health professionals who were with Maradona in their last days of pain and confusion.
Each one faces up to 25 years in prison if he is guilty of guilty homicide, a crime similar to involuntary homicide, not to murder, and when that process ends three or four months from now on, another will begin against an eighth person, such is the demand for answers. Such is anger. Such is the perfect way that the chaos of Maradona's life has followed him to death.
To follow the terminology used this week by Fernando Burlando, a lawyer who represents the daughters of Maradona, his father was “killed.” Ferrari has been only marginally more reserved.
His words on Tuesday: “There was no control in that house, any type of protocol in a horror theater that was that house Diego Armando Maradona died, where no one did what they had to do.”
We cannot predict if that will be corroborated in the coming months. But the last four years have brought an almost constant current of accusations about what happened in the period between November 12, 2020, when Maradona left the hospital shortly after brain surgery, and his death for a heart attack 13 days later on that property.
Without a doubt, some will be repeated for the 100 or more witnesses called to this trial, such as the WhatsApp message sent to a neurologist in which he trusted, Leopoldo Luque, to a commercial partner in the days prior to Maradona's death: “The fat man will end up kicking the bucket.”
Luque is among those accused of failure and, together with a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a pair of medical and nursing coordinators, a doctor and a night nurse, denies the accusations.
There have also been reports that Maradona was dragged with a farm 'like an animal', that it lacks lucidity to have an adequate word in its convalescence and speak in an imaginary mobile phone or request beers at 9 am as well as with the variety of addictions that destroyed it first, it is suggested that there was an absence of those willing to stand up and interpose in their way.
The prosecutors showed an image of Maradona at the time of his death at the Court the first day of the trial. The great time abdomen was completely swollen and was lying on his bed
Veronica Ojeda, Maradona's ex -wife, was one of which to attend judicial procedures
Dalma Maradona, one of her daughters, also attended the first day of the case
Maradona's supporters raised a sign that demanded 'justice' outside the Court in Buenos Aires
The funeral car that carries Maradona's coffin to the cemetery in 2020 was received by thousands
Then, he has the warnings not heard of a nurse on his pulse climbing to 115 beats per minute: he scored the same amount of goals for Napoli once, and scathing evaluations about a personnel who said he lacked a defibrillator and diligence. He had been dead for about six and a half hours before someone realized and are details that take this tragedy to deeper places.
Could it have been something different with different people? Or would that have simply pushed the date of what always seemed so horribly inevitable? Unfortunately, we can probably make a safe assumption about at least one of the answers there.
The rest falls into the hands of a court in San Isidro. Located in the sections of the north of Buenos Aires, it is described as a charming and quiet suburb for the wealthy, with cobbled streets wrapped around a neo -Gothic cathedral in its heart, but the place has descended to Bedlam in recent days, based on news coverage.
Apart from the blue smoke flares that shot at the skies, and all fans shouted 'justice' about police railings, the former lover of Maradona, Veronica Ojeda, was heard shouting 'daughter of AB ****' in one of the defendants on Tuesday.
Due to the whims of social networks algorithms, some of those clips appeared in my timeline directly next to one that I had never seen from Maradona in action.
He returned to 2000, when he was preparing for the testimony of Lothar Matthaus. You can see that it is overweight, a decade and a half after their excesses entered, but its touch was preserved as a beauty.
Standing in the tunnel, start rhythmically bouncing the ball between its posts and the floor, six inches and six inches down, again and again, before changing the equipment and heading 13 in a row against the union of the floor and the wall, like Steve McQueen with its baseball in the great escape.
It is a wonderful piece of images, even if he is not in a league with what he did in the field at his best, or even the heating of his days in Napoli, doing those uppies, laces without cauling, shaking his hips to a bit of Opus. Living is life. And in life, Maradona was much more than a footballer; It was a means to raise your pulse to 115 beats per minute, whether you were from Argentina or anywhere else.
To live in fall from there to that house, and that end, it will remain forever as one of the saddest and most predictable tragedies of Sport, regardless of how the courts blame.
Monahan several hundred shots through torque
I have been in the Golf of players in Florida this week and the trip began with the commissioner of the PGA tour, Jay Monahan, which provides a multitude of words in the delivery of little substance.
As always, that meant a series of long responses that gave zero details about the state of fusion conversations with the Saudi sponsors of the LIV circuit, which is understood that it affected greater turbulence after 21 months of stagnation.
With little obvious awareness of irony, Monahan announced plans to address the slow game in the course delivering penalty blows. To apply the beginning of the latter to the tedium of the first, Monahan and his companions negotiators are several hundred shots at par.
The PGA tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, supplied words of small substance
Perplexed Ratcliffe by Public Relations Nightmare
Gary Neville harmed Sir Jim Ratcliffe this week by pointing out that Manchester United did not need to eliminate the £ 40,000 fund to former players. Instead of causing a public relations nightmare, Neville argued that they could have sent Harry Maguire and a couple of teammates to a dinner and the same sum would easily rise selling tables to fans.
After a few seconds of thought, Ratcliffe agreed that it was a plausible alternative. Sometimes we assume great wisdom in the super rich and, often, we give too much credit.