King's realm crumbles to white dust

"On a good day, Maradona forgot what he had become and just went out and played." Jimmy Burns, The Hand of God.

Son of an Argentinian rural peasant father and an Italian immigrant worker mother; one-time Buenos Aires street-urchin beggar; warm-up circus-act juggler at major Buenos Aires matches; subsequent star of those games with Boca Juniors; then Barcelona, then Naples, then the king of the world with Argentina; finally, overweight cocaine addict. It is no wonder that on his good days, in Jimmy Burns' phrase, Diego Armando Maradona loved the simple thrill of being just a footballer.

The problem was that Diego Maradona was never just a footballer. Maradona's gifts made him truly great, great enough for him to win the 1986 World Cup almost singlehandedly, but also great enough for him to become another Argentinian Evita in a country desperate for populist heroes. The problem with the problem was the relentless pressure greatness brought with it.

Just eight years old when first discovered swinging his sweet left foot in his shanty town home, Maradona was displaying his talents on television soon after. Not long after that he was given his first injection to make his allegedly undernourished body grow. Thus began a lifelong connection with drugs. He was a national figure by his teens. But he may never have been allowed to mature; the answer to a Diego question seems to have been always "Yes".

Eventually it all consumed Maradona. In January he collapsed in a Uruguayan resort following a millennium blow-out. After America refused him entry for treatment, his friend Fidel Castro did not. So now, not yet 40, but with his good days behind him, Maradona is in Havana, bloated and lost, trying to recover from what he has become.

That, as Maradona talks about frankly in a new documentary to be shown on Tuesday on Channel 4, is a drug addict. Thankfully, there is no equivocation on that. Cocaine, not football, became Diego's real thing. "I tried it in Barcelona in '83," he says. "I'd be lying if I said it hadn't hurt me."

Diego Maradona was only 21 when he joined Barcelona, but even in 1982 he was said to be earning $70,000 per month. He was already the world's greatest player and at arguably its biggest club, but as the then Barcelona captain Lobo Carrasco says of Maradona at that time in Burns' book: "He seemed to be still terribly innocent and hungry. His eyes were like two big plates. He wanted to eat the world, and that scared me."

As we all know now, he did eat the world, or at least snorted it. Along the way he scared a lot of people, including the four journalists he shot with his air gun in 1994 after he had been sent home from the USA World Cup having tested positive for banned substances.

That was the public beginning of the end for Diego and its literal appearance was thought to have come earlier this year when Maradona collapsed, knocked sideways by cocaine. In Uruguay, doctors revealed that only 38 per cent of Maradona's heart tissue was functioning as it should.

Coked up, wrecked physically, paranoid and willing to trust only his closest confidants, it is all the more remarkable that Tuesday's documentary, entitled Maradona - Kicking the Habit, was even made.

Belfast's Double-Band Films, responsible for Escobar's Own Goal, deserve praise merely for having the optimism and perseverance to succeed. They have once again ventured to Central and South America and come back with a gem. The degree of difficulty involved in gaining access to global sports celebrities like Maradona is immense. Double-Band, however, were aided by Maradona, post-playing days, being in confessional mode.

Nevertheless, after three weeks of "the phone line going dead" between Belfast and Havana, it was an anxious Mike Hewitt from Double-Band who set off for Cuba - uninvited - in mid May. The man whom Hewitt had to somehow persuade to allow access to Maradona was Guillermo Coppola, Maradona's most influential agent-manager, and, as related in Burns' biography, a man interviewed over the murder of a Buenos Aires nightclub owner.

But the gamble worked. Not only did Maradona co-operate openly in an extended interview, he allowed Double-Band to film him at recuperation, rest and play.

Coppola is always close by. He is the chief secretary in this exiled court. Maradona is always in the centre. It is unsurprising that his world-view is distorted; all he has ever seen when he has looked out is his reflection. For many years he has referred to himself in the third person.

It is unappealing to witness such dilapidated vanity, especially when there are regular reminders of what Maradona was capable of on the pitch. Footage from Argentina's match with Brazil in the 1990 World Cup, where Maradona slices through the Brazilian midfield, lures their terrified defenders and then supplies the ball rightfooted to Claudio Caniggia to go on and score, is particularly fantastic.

It lends weight to a claim from one of Maradona's former Argentina team-mates Jorge Valdano that Maradona was a generous team player as well as the supreme individual. "The only ones who have known the authentic Maradona have been other players. He was a capricious, rebellious person - except when he was playing. On the pitch we all loved him . . . If the game was getting difficult he knew he had to offer something extra - to do a Maradona. The game against England was the most difficult of the 1986 World Cup. You could have tossed a coin on the result. He tossed the coin, with his foot, with his hand."

The Argentina-England match in the Mexico World Cup became notorious. After scoring the opening goal with his fist, Maradona claimed it was an intervention by "the hand of God". All Argentina wailed its approval, revenge for their defeat in the Falklands War four years earlier.

"I was and will always be happy with the goal I scored off my hand," says Maradona in Tuesday's film. "I offer the English a thousand apologies, but I'd still do it again. In Argentina a carterista is a pickpocket. That's what I did to the English, I stole their wallet without them realising. Argentinians are proud because no one saw me. They identify with that.

"The people saw it as revenge for the war. To me it was just a match and afterwards I embraced the English players. For us it was just another game."

Having said that, as the film ends, Maradona toasts: "My Scottish friends. Wales. Ireland. The two Irelands." Maybe he just forgot to mention England.

Maradona's second goal in that game was one of the most beautiful ever. The cocky cheek and audacious beauty beguiled a nation. Yet Maradona had already left Argentina for Spain and Italy. Today he is still not resettled in his home country despite efforts to do so. He has tried coaching in Argentina and would like another go: "I dream of coaching Manchester United, Barcelona. I dream of coaching Real Madrid, Boca Juniors, the Argentina team. They'll never kill my dreams."

Sadly the kill seems self-inflicted already, but while there are moments in the film when he acts as though nothing has changed - he dives into the swimming-pool when Boca Juniors score in a match he is watching on television, then emerges with a fat cigar in his mouth - there are other more reflective offerings.

"I'd like to work because it would help me not to think about drugs. The problem is no one would employ someone who takes drugs. It's discrimination."

Well, it is and it isn't. Maradona turns 40 in October having suffered from not being discriminating enough. Today he is reliant on the goodwill of "Comadante Castro", a relationship based presumably on Fidel's liking for Maradona's rebelliousness - or his brilliant football, the good days.

Back then, Maradona may have been able to forget what he had become. But the good days dwindled and there is something very Las Vegas about him in this programme. In the words of a comparable cultural figure, Elvis Presley, the problem was that too often Diego Armando Maradona: "Forgot to remember to forget."

Maradona - Kicking the Habit, Channel 4, Tuesday 8pm. Hand of God, The Life of Diego Maradona, by Jimmy Burns, Bloomsbury u £6.99 sterling.