David Pleat still remembers the night England lost to Argentina at the Azteca Stadium in 1986, and he remembers it for two goals that could not have been more different. One was the Hand of God goal, the other a solo run he called the best he had seen live. England went out, Diego Maradona walked away with the headlines, and the match stayed lodged in World Cup memory.
Pleat was watching England for ITV when Maradona first rose into the story through controversy and then through genius. He later recalled a clumsy live line about the Argentine forward, saying: “Maradona gets amazing elevation on his balls from the tightest of angles.” The quote has lasted because the match did too. At the Azteca, 114,000 people saw England play Argentina, and many of them watched the same sequence Pleat did: Maradona’s first goal, then, minutes later, a second that turned the game into folklore.
On the first goal, Pleat did not dress it up. He said Maradona raised his arm, the ball struck his hand and went into the net, and that the absence of a linesman’s flag and a referee’s whistle left Maradona taking the glory for a clear piece of cheating. England players raced toward Ali Ben Nasser to protest, but the goal stood. Ben Nasser never refereed another World Cup game, and he took the ball home as a souvenir. That has helped the moment endure, because the simplest explanation remains the hardest to ignore: if a handball is not spotted, it counts, even when everyone on the pitch knows what happened.
The friction in Pleat’s memory is that he does not reduce the move to cold-blooded intent. He argues Maradona may have raised his arm to avoid being hit by Peter Shilton, yet he still says the Argentina captain claimed the glory from what he saw as cheating. That ambiguity is part of why the goal still divides people. The second goal, by contrast, offered none. Maradona twisted and turned past Reid and Peter Beardsley, then Butcher and Terry Fenwick, before beating Peter Shilton, and Pleat said it was the best goal he had seen live. Bobby Robson had already sent on Chris Waddle and John Barnes, and Gary Lineker had headed in a superb cross from John Barnes, but England were eliminated all the same.
Pleat’s recollection matters because it captures both sides of the same World Cup afternoon: the insult of the Hand of God goal and the brilliance of the second strike that followed it. Few matches carry both a disputed moment and a contender for the greatest goal ever scored, and fewer still leave behind a debate that survives decades later. For England, the night ended in defeat. For Maradona, it became legend.
