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Diego Maradona storms past Belgium’s defenders during the 1986 World Cup in Mexico
[El Grafico/Creative Commons]
EARLY in the second half of the opening match of the 1982 World Cup, Osvaldo Ardiles feigned a shot from a free kick and instead passed the ball to his 21-year-old team-mate standing beside the defensive wall.
His attempted chipped pass was comfortably cleared by the Belgium defence. A move typical of a game in which the defending world champions, Argentina, floundered during a 1-0 defeat.
During this otherwise unremarkable play, high up in the upper tier of Barcelona’s Camp Nou, a 30-year-old photographer with little experience of shooting football, had captured an image which would live in the consciousness of the sporting world far longer than the result of the game and even outlive the subject of the picture, a young Diego Maradona.
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If true, the photo’s history is a damning indictment of the systematic exploitation of non-Western journalists by Western media organisations – a pattern that persists today, posit KATE CANTRELL and ALISON BEDFORD