Around 20 artists dedicated songs to the rhythm of Tango, this genre of which Diego Armando Maradona was a lover as he expressed on repeated occasions.
At the time, the rhythm of the 2 × 4 moved Maradona to tears. “I went outside [a jugar a Europa] at 22 without knowing tango. When I came back, I came back with a tango in the truck, crying, ”Maradona said in a television interview. It was Clavelitos, the song by Miguel Moreno that accompanied him when he returned to football in his native country, in 1993. He was already a consecrated player after having won the World Cup with the Argentine team in 1986 and made Naples champion of Italy, but he also had a history of drug addiction, especially cocaine.
Tango versions of songs like La Mano de Dios, popularized by the quarterer Rodrigo or La vida tombola, by Manu Chao, were performed alongside unpublished works, such as the instrumental El gol del Siglo, or some of El Diego’s favorite songs, such as Cucusita, also from Montero. That song, which the footballer sang in 1992 in a charity event in favor of a center for the disabled, was performed at the festival by an emotional Hernán Cucuza Castiello while images were projected behind with Diego’s best plays.
Almost a decade earlier, when he was a Barcelona player, one night he stepped onto the Camp Nou in a suit instead of wearing a Barça shirt. Caminito sang along with Julio Iglesias and Plácido Domingo in front of more than 70,000 people. “I love tango. I do it very badly, that is also true, but whoever does not try, never knows how it will go. So I always like to try, “he said in another television interview.
His voice reached the audience through an emotional recording made by the Cachivache Orquesta. He was heard singing El Sueño del Pibe from the small television of the house where he lived in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Paternal, near the Argentinos Juniors stadium, the club with which he debuted in first class. In the video, projected on a giant screen, Bruno Tombari and Rocío Lequio dance through the different rooms of that house, now a museum, in which the legend began to be forged.
“They will tell you so many things about me, but everything is a lie, nothing is true, because I… because I no longer die…, because I no longer die. I who was an imperfect god, the insurrectionary side of eternity, today I am already part of everyone’s air, nobody’s, my property. Today, twenty-five of a month of any year, what could matter! Today, like yesterday and tomorrow, my flag will be the heir rage of the marginal South “, sang Castiello in the tango Yo no muero, with lyrics by Alejandro Szwarcman and music by Pablo Covacevich.
“Diego belongs to everyone and we all have him in our hearts”, Javier Cardenal Domínguez continued, amid applause, before performing a tribute to Maradona with lyrics by the poet Horacio Ferrer accompanied by Hernán Reinaudo on guitar. “The songs remain, as well as their magic,” said another tango singer, Chino Laborde, when he performed To see you dribble.
Magic in the feet. Maradona’s eternal with the ball; the ephemeral that sprouts from some dancers on the milongueras nights of Buenos Aires. The festival brought together tango and soccer on stage in a show that ended almost as it had begun, amid applause and chants of “Maradó, Maradó”. (The country)