“The encounter with God. Ecstasy thanks to the ball.” This is the title of Tommaso Mandato (Portici, Naples, 1960) chapter 11 of his book “Il centravanti in giacca e cravatta (the center forward in suit and tie)”. On March 18, 1985, just half a year after landing in Naples, Diego Maradona played the most clandestine, least mediatic and most supportive game of his entire life. “When people talk about the history of Maradona in Naples, about drugs, and all that, they probably don’t have the arguments to comment on real stories like the one I lived through,” says Mandato just below the mural painted for Diego in 1990 in the Quarteri Spagnoli of Naples.
The story is what follows. Pietro Puzone was a young Napoli footballer born in Acerra, a town in the Campania region about 15 kilometers northeast of the capital. Puzone went to ask Maradona for help. The son of Gennaro Quarto, a countryman from Acerra, had a malformation of the palate that was atrophying his face. He needed funds for an operation in Switzerland. Maradona went to talk to Corrado Ferlaino, president of Napoli, to play a charity match at San Paolo. But Ferlaino did not listen to Puzone or Maradona twice, who set in motion plan B: play the match at the Stadio Comunale de Acerra. Gennaro contacted the president of Real Santa Lucia, a regional team, who was a friend of his. Mandato played on that team. “It seemed like an incredible thing. We were going to play against Maradona. And on a Monday. They had a match on Sunday against Atalanta…”.
To top it off, it dawned with rain. Not all the companions supported the initiative of Maradona and Puzone. Only twelve Napoli footballers traveled to Acerra, if we include Lalo, Diego’s brother. There were also classics like Bruscolotti or De Simone. “The field was a mess. A quagmire, all mud and mud. But there he was. The match was taken as if it were a European Cup. He dribbled, he dribbled, he scored goals for us. I think the match ended 9-1”, says Mandato as he savors a coffee on Via Toledo in Naples.
Maradona even insured his legs with the British Lloyds Bank for a value of about 12 million lire. He played with so little fear despite the appalling state of the pitch that, according to Tommaso, he drafted the goal of the century on that Monday in March 1985 at Acerra. “He left everyone, including the goalkeeper. It was an action identical to the one he would do a year later against England. It was unique. And a human uncle.”. Tommaso says that, at one point in the match, “there was a throw-in and I tried to steal the ball from him. He controlled, turned around and pierced me at the same time. He then he scored a goal. The people went crazy. He came for me and said: Don’t think I wanted to tease you. I replied: Diego, that you have made me a pipe I can tell my grandchildren.
The journalist Gabriella Simoni presented last Tuesday in Naples a docufilm and a book entitled “La Partita nel Fango; un giorno nella vita di Maradona”. Tommaso Mandato says that the journalists were mocked that day by Diego and that that match, of which there are some very basic images on YouTube, with Maradona warming up in the parking lot of the Stadio Comunale de Acerra, was only recorded by two Argentine friends. In the presentation of the docufilm, the journalist Pasquale Sansone is also included as a witness of that show that these days would be impossible. The day Maradona went down into the mud for a good cause. In March a statue of Maradona is inaugurated in the place where the Comunale de Acerra used to be (it was demolished).