The biggest sin of all: wasting your talent

Having a conversation with Lucas (a reader of Mundo Albiceleste and an Argentina fan through and through), I came up with a thought and here I am to try and share it with you.

I believe there is no bigger sin than wasting your talent. Lets face it...when you have no talent, you're going to rely on your determination or your hard work to make up for it. If you don't succeed in whatever you do in life and it happens because you have no talent in what you were trying to do and you gave it your best shot, then nobody can say anything bad about you. After all...you did whatever you could and you did try your best. You'll feel no regrets at all.

If you do possess all the talent you need and you waste it, that is when you will regret it. It is when you'll probably be criticised, by those who love you and those who don't.

In a way, even when he achieved the most important prize there is in football and he reached the status of a true legend of the game, I think Diego MARADONA is perhaps the clearest example of someone who committed a crime against himself.

I don't know whether you can still say he is a complete waste of talent. After all, he did achieved many things in football, but there is no doubt in my mind that he did boycotted himself and cut his career short when he was on top of the world.

He felt invincible and that was probably because he was! But he suffered from a terrible addiction that made him a worse player than he was and caused him so many problems in his career and even more so in his personal life. Not to mention the court of flattering parasites that did him no good with bad advices and sucked his money in the meantime.

With his talent and the incredible ability his body had to take on some brutal treatment from rivals without suffering many major injuries (barring that broken ankle when he was in Barcelona in a match against Athletic Bilbao), MARADONA could have played in at least one more World Cup (if only as a super-sub or an influential squad member at 38) and he could have achieved many more things at club level.

Right now, somehow I think what he is doing to the team is the same thing he did to himself in the past, when he was a player.

What we are witnessing (especially against Paraguay last night) is probably a perfect representation of what I'm trying to say here.

He has all the tools at his disposal. He started off with the complete respect and admiration from every player he called up to play for him. He had the media on his side. The public opinion too. Everybody wanted him to succeed and to cap an incredibly captivating Cinderella story. What better redemption for him (after all the troubles he has had to endure) than leading MESSI and co. to the next World Cup and actually have a shot at winning it?

We've been keen supporters of Diego here at Mundo Albiceleste and somehow we've been fooled by how things are developing. Because we always thought he wasn't going to be alone in this. We thought someone like BILARDO would have a saying in the coaching and the tactical preparations, but obviously we were wrong and now we're suffering just as much (if not more) than all the other true Argentina fans.

What is going on lately and the succession of wrong decisions after bad judgements after terrible choices, is like a perfect metaphor of what the last days of MARADONA 'The Player' were.

The only thing I still believe is that he didn't have enough time to work with his team, but that's hardly an excuse. I believe that even with the little time he has had, things could have been done much better. We can't ask this team to play by heart and to know where each team-mate will be at all times even without looking. That takes a lot of time and work and chemistry. All I'm asking is to see a team that knows what system they are going to be using. A team with at least a hint of an identity. Some kind of tactical awareness. Because the class and the quality is there.

If you look at the talent we have to pick from, all you can think of is that there is something very wrong in the way we are performing. Especially when you see a couple of 36-year old players from the domestic league trying to fish for a ball to see if you could hit jackpot and get away with crime.

Diego has always been contradictory and eventually, he was only hurting himself when he was at his worst. Right now, with what he is doing, he is also hurting the fans we've got not only in Argentina but all over the world. He is hurting our players (I'm not saying they are saints or Gods. And not all of them are the same, but their image with many fans is certainly getting unfairly stained). He is hurting the history of our national team. A history for which, ironically, he wrote the most important pages with his delicious left foot and his heart of a lion.

He is hurting himself and it seems like there is nothing we can do about it but suffer from our very own positions.

We seriously need things to change dramatically or else, the crown MARADONA was not afraid of losing when he took over as a manager, will forever fall from his head.

I for one, surely don't want that, but as I said many times here on Mundo Albiceleste, with GRONDONA calling the shots and knowing that Diego won't quit, I don't see a quick solution for this mess we're in neck-deep.

And it makes me sad.