Hello and welcome to this week's edition of CHI - the Contemporary History Intervention. This is the
fifth video that we do in this series and if you look at the list of topics we've covered so far,
well we've talked about coups, we've talked about the ghosts of the twentieth century,
we've talked about learning from disaster and we've talked about Trump's impeachment.
I think that we shows why we need a break.
So it's time to do something completely different and so I will dedicate
this video to Maradona's hand.
Now I guess most of you know what I'm talking about but just in case, and anyway historians
always like to get the facts straight, we're talking about an event on June 22 1986. It took
place in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. England was playing against Argentina in the
World Cup Quarter Final and early in the second half Maradona scored a goal using his left hand.
Four minutes later he scored another goal, this time a legitimate one,
after a 60 yard dash from midfield and that goal is now famous as the Goal of the Century. Later
in the game Gary Lineker scored but it was not enough - England lost the game 2-1 to Argentina
and England was out in the quarter final and they didn't even have to miss a penalty.
Now Maradona died last year on November 26 around three months ago
and if you look at commentary from the world of football I think there was pretty unanimous
opinion - Diego Maradona was a great football player
with a not so great career afterwards but that thing with his hand that really was not ok.
What I'd like to do here is show the courage of the contemporary historian and
take on the consensual opinion of the world of football and show you
that this is a flawed reading. You just didn't get what this was all about.
Now, when it comes to context there's lots of commentary that seizes on the Falklands War.
Four years before this match Argentina lost the Falklands War against England but there is
a much wider and much more significant context that we need to talk about. When we talk about
Maradona's hand, we really need to talk about five centuries of the pillage of a continent.
If you look at Latin America in world history over the last 500 years there's a pretty clear
place for Latin America in today's world. It is the resource continent par excellence.
It is a supplier of endless amounts of silver and gold, of tobacco, of indigo, of sugar, of coffee,
bananas, and lots of other products and all these other products come to us in the West
at very low cost and this has shaped our collective imagination and the western
world, in the western historical imagination,
food and raw materials are cheap - they come without much hassle - they aren't a big problem.
Well, it looks very different from a Latin American perspective. The price
of resource extraction is etched into the land, it's etched into societies,
and it's etched into their understanding of history. When I talked about five centuries of
the pillage of a continent, I should have talked about this book - Edouard Galleano's Open Veins
of Latin America - a long rant about all the injustices that went along with the plunder of
a continent - and how they are shaping societies across Latin America. And those who like a more
refined critique - they can go for dependency theory. A genuine Latin American contribution
to global economic thought composed in the post war years and the central argument is
when we talk about markets for resources, when we talk about the exchange between Latin America
and the industrialised world, we are not talking about trade between equals. We talk about a tilted
playing field. A playing field that is tilted towards the advantage of the western world and
to the disadvantage of Latin America. How does this matter for Maradona's hand? Well, if you get
angry about that cheat, it really only makes sense if you assume that the game takes place on a level
playing field and when it comes to competition between Latin America and the western world,
from a Latin American perspective the idea of a level playing field is pretty absurd.
Yes, there are formal rules as those rules are that aren't forced by referees but these rules
are only one part of the game, the other part are fundamental underlying injustices that nobody
talks about and these injustices are evident in the world of football who after all why did Diego
Maradona play for European teams at the times that he played for Argentina in the world cup?
Football takes place on a playing field that is tilted towards Europe and
people in Latin America know that very well and see that on a daily basis.
So where does that leave us with a view to Maradona's hand? Was it ok? Is it ok to
cheat? Well this is a video for the University of Birmingham that goes through their official
accounts and if I go on record now saying that cheating is ok I guess I'll get a call from a
compliance officer at the University who will tell me Frank we need to talk about the code of conduct
so I won't say that cheating is ok but I'll say something else and it's something that historians
say more often - I'll say look at things in context. Before Maradona scored with his left
hand, he actually made a dash across forty/fifty yards from midfield very similar to the Goal of
the Century four minutes later, then he passed the ball, Steve Hodge tried to clear but he could only
kick it into the empty space between Maradona and Peter Shilton and the rest is history.
That is the context that gets lost in all the commentary about Maradona's hand - a 40 yard dash
past several England football players that showed the greatness of Diego Maradona. So
if you're still fuming about the Hand of God, you just don't get what the game is all about.