“Today the players are more collective, more team players.” – Diego Maradona
Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but my computer is running very slow and freezing often :( I Hope to repair it these days and post more soon. Other than that… it’s summer and Bucharest is full of terraces, bistros and other places to drink and lose your time!
Yet I want to show you this little piece of wisdom coming from the man himself, Maradona!
“The game’s best – Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, Wayne Rooney, etc. – often failed to lift their play and, in turn, their teams, to a level this grand stage demands.
The conventional wisdom on why: They were too selfish, unable to adapt to the team concept of a national squad.
Then there’s Diego Maradona’s take: Unlike the past, the stars weren’t selfish enough. [...]
This goes against so much of what we’ve come to believe, and expect, in sports. The reason that Uruguay and the Netherlands square off here Tuesday in a semifinal is because they embraced selfless, team-oriented play.
Such a mentality is celebrated.
What Maradona is suggesting is that this line of thinking has become so widespread it’s actually killed the star player, who no longer acts like a star player. Rather than demanding his place in the natural pecking order of pure talent and past performance, they sink back into the pack. [...]
“I think we were more selfish,” Maradona said, which has to be the first time an old player said that about a bygone era. “Maybe before it was about being selfish players who [made the] rest of the team work for us.”
Today’s players receive remarkable hype – television commercials, video games and media attention. They are single-name personalities around the globe.
Yet you’d never hear one say that the rest of the team works for them. They’d be vilified. Instead today’s stars go out of their way to support their teammates and talk publicly about how no one player is more important than the other.
Only some players are more important, Maradona notes.
Consider the most competitive environments on earth – the military battlefield, the flight deck of a commercial airliner or a hospital operating table.
This is where failure is not an option. In those cultures, the delineation between the star (the general, the lead pilot) and the others (private, flight attendant) is clear. Often socialization between classes is prohibited – enlisted men do not dine with officers – and the word of the higher-ranked person must be respected.
When having open-heart surgery, no patient would care if the lead surgeon is friends with or helps empower the nurse. In fact, the idea that the nurse would fear disappointing the lead surgeon and would clearly defer to him at all times might be considered a positive. You’d want the most brilliant talent to be the leader.
In Maradona’s day, he says, that carried over to a soccer team. He was Diego Maradona and they were not. [...]
In this time, the star player must be humble and supportive. And not just on the field, but in all parts of team life. [...]“
I’ve almost quoted the entire article to make sure you read it 
So, what do you think? Don’t you just find him INSPIRATIONAL?
Watch Maradona as a junior talking about his two dreams:
A lot of people have had a lot to say on this lately – and I’ll post a couple or more links – but one video in particular attracted my attention:
Forminte has been talking about her almost exclusively, OK, coaches do have favorites - whether they show it or not - she IS his “star student”, only that he’s been doing her more wrong than good with this attitude! So, what do we have? A foolishly proud coach and a young girl – but a little more than a teenager – a successful gymnast, and what is he telling her that she looks so heartbroken? Trying to make her come to Constanța?? What for?
And yes, the Chinese ARE phenomenal – I mean, PHENOMENAL, three times per minute!
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