My first memory of live football on TV is Diego Maradona. Not the 1986 World Cup, not Michel Platini’s missed penalty, not Rudi Voeller’s equaliser in the final, not even the through ball to Jorge Burruchaga. Just Maradona.

It was a year that taught a generation of Indians to celebrate the world’s greatest game. A season when it became clear why Swami Vivekananda had chosen these words to illustrate his philosophy on education: “You will be closer to heaven through football than through the study of the Gita.” It was a time when the most charismatic sportsman of all time was at his most charismatic.

Few other international sportsmen, before or since, have hit levels of perfection like Argentina’s Maradona did in the ’80s. One of them, Roger Federer, was stunned this week in the final of the US Open by Maradona’s countryman Juan Martin del Porto — a result that will remain significant for years to come, even if the match may not have been one for the ages.

Del Porto was born to a veterinarian father and a teacher mother in Tandil, a picturesque hillside town in western Argentina, three years after the World Cup in Mexico — a time when Maradona was preparing to captain the national team to Italia ’90. He grew up as a Boca Juniors fan — the club where the Maradona legend began — and when he was nine, the ‘Maradonian Church’ was set up by fans. As a boy, he naturally preferred football to tennis. “I played soccer better than tennis. I don’t know what I am doing here,” del Potro said after winning in New York on Monday.

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