“IF MANCHESTER UNITED NEED A COACH, I’M THE MAN TO DO IT”
Go to Mexico and track down Diego Maradona,” said the editor in chief of FourFourTwo. Such a simple sentence and such an interesting idea, but so fraught with difficulties.
One: Mexican football’s second division was about to finish and there was little guarantee that he would stay into next season.
We had visions of getting there, only to discover Diego pictured lying on a beach somewhere far away. The last regular game of the campaign was mid-April. The earliest we could get there was April 29, days before the Clausura play-off final.
Two: when we made contact with Dorados de Sinaloa, Maradona’s club, they were polite but very clear that the Argentine icon does not give one-on-one sit-down interviews. The 1986 World Cup winner speaks to the media only in pre- and post-game press conferences.
Three: Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico – Diego’s home since taking charge of Dorados back in September – was a byword for narcos and international drug cartels. The United States Intelligence Community regards the Sinaloa Cartel, of which Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman (below) was the leader, as the most powerful drug trafficking organisation on the planet.
This is a place where few tourists dare go, and when FFT purchased The Rough Guide to Mexico, there wasn’t one single word about Culiacan, a city of 785,000, in its 1,979 pages. Almost every mention of Sinaloa, the state of which Culiacan is the capital, relates to crime. In April, the US imposed its highest level four ‘Do not travel’ warning on Sinaloa due to the danger to visitors. Syria also has a level four.
Further US government advice was even less encouraging: ‘Do not travel to Sinaloa state. Violent crime is widespread. Criminal organisations are based and operating there.’
Four: it ain’t cheap to send a journalist from Europe to Mexico, especially when there’s no concrete plan in place. But the editor believes in investing in original journalism, and with 10 minutes left of Manchester United’s dire 1-1 draw against Chelsea, this writer legged it out of the Old Trafford press box only 70 minutes before a flight to Paris.
My brother waited outside the stadium with the engine running, security let me through and I just made the flight, and the one-hour connection in France. The 12-hour overnight flight to Mexico City (which flew straight back over Manchester) landed in darkness at 4am local time. After a three-hour wait, I hopped aboard a two-hour flight on a small plane of casually-suited men north to Culiacan, which sits close to the Pacific Ocean and is eight time zones from the UK. As we travelled east, I saw daylight for the first time in
