As one of British football’s best full-backs of the 1980s, Gary Stevens won league titles and cups with both Everton in England and Rangers in Scotland. For 's national team, he played in two and one UEFA EURO. Yet these days he jokes that his "biggest claim to fame" lies elsewhere. “I’m on a postage stamp,” he explains, with a smile. It is an Argentinian stamp no less and for that, he has Diego Maradona to thank. After Maradona had inspired La Albiceleste to their World Cup triumph at Mexico 1986, a set of stamps was produced back in his home country – one of them an image of the concluding moment of his magnificent second goal in Argentina’s 2-1 quarter-final victory over England. Stevens, a member of Bobby Robson's England team that day, can been seen standing helpless in the six-yard box as Argentina’s skipper caps his wondrous slalom with a low strike inside the near post.
Now living near Perth in Western Australia and working as a physiotherapist, Stevens – once a teenaged stamp collector – tells FIFA how he discovered this unlikely silver lining from one of his clients. “I was treating some guy a few years back and he said, ‘I believe you're a philatelist’ – which is what a stamp collector is —and I said, ‘Yeah’. He said, ‘You know you're on a stamp, don't you?’.”
The next time he visited Stevens’ clinic, he presented him with the block of four stamps that together captured that moment in time on 22 June 1986. “Who else do you know that's on an international stamp?” adds Stevens, who duly displayed the stamps in a picture frame on a wall at home. With goalkeeper Peter Shilton and centre-back Terry Butcher grounded like skittles, Stevens was, literally, the last defender standing in the six-yard box when Maradona scored that second Argentina goal. He remembers waiting for Argentina's No10 to “pull his leg back”, in order to read where the shot might go and try to react. He explains: “You're looking for somebody just to raise their leg, so you know if they're going to sidefoot it or whatever else. It gives you a little bit of a clue. I was waiting for him to pull his leg back to slot it but he toe-pokes it at the very last minute. And even that, as far as I'm concerned, was brilliant because he didn't give me a clue about what he was going to do.”
Maradona’s two goals that day must be among the most replayed in football history. And Stevens had a front-row seat for the first – the 'Hand of God' goal – too. As the defender standing closest to Maradona and Shilton as they jumped to contest the ball, he actually thought Maradona had headed it into the net. “He completely bamboozled me,” he says. “I see him go with his head and the angle I had was roughly the same angle the referee would have had. Obviously from the side, you see him do the punch but he flicked his head too so what I saw was Maradona doing this [flick] with his head.”
It is fascinating to hear Stevens relive other details from that most famous of all previous . He starts with the “pretty rough” pitch which was a world away from the “magnificent” surface that Thomas Tuchel’s team played on at the same stadium in their .
The time of the kick-off, he adds, posed an even greater challenge. This was a contest that kicked off at midday in Mexico City. “In the Azteca with the altitude, that was the hardest thing, the temperature,” he says. Indeed, Stevens lost so much fluid he ended up “eleven pounds” – or five kilos – lighter. Then, after all, there were no water bottles or hydration breaks, but a considerably less effective solution. “It was like a goldfish bag from the fair, full of water," he explains. "And they'd throw them on the pitch, and if you had an opportunity, you'd grab one, bite it and just take on what you could.” Stevens also describes the scene afterwards when he and centre-back Terry Butcher were escorted to a dressing room for a post-match drug test. Sitting on the other side of the dressing room were two Argentina players. “Guess who got picked? Maradona and the number five, Jose Luis Brown, who scored in the final. They were drinking water because they were still in the tournament. We were out so we got a crate of beer. We couldn't give a sample for about 90 minutes and so were sat drinking beer —Terry and I were smashed!”
Today with a clearer head, he elaborates on his admiration for Maradona, starting with his impressive turn of pace. “I always considered myself quite quick and I did come up against him quite a lot in that game and his pace over 10 yards was incredible. He just had an energy.”
To that, of course, add the preternatural balance and low centre of gravity that left England’s finest trailing in this wake. “The most brilliant players have just got that balance. I played against George Best once and I don't know how they do it. [Maradona’s second goal] wasn't a crazy dribble. He didn't have many touches – it might have been ten but each touch seemed to take him past a player. [Lionel] Messi's the same. They just go past you.” This brings us to the question of how England can stop Messi in Wednesday’s semi-final and succeed where his England failed against Maradona 40 years ago. It is a question to which he responds warily, given the enormous differences between football then and now. “Maradona was in his absolute heyday – it was absolute perfect timing for him – but, you know, Messi's very experienced,” he begins. “The issue with these superstars is you can't set your stall out to mark them out of a game because you're talking about international football so there's another 10 players on the park.” That said, there are a couple of things that Stevens, later a substitute when England lost their 1990 World Cup semi-final against West Germany, would like to see from Tuchel's men in Atlanta. He says: “I think they need higher intensity from the start. They've been slow in the first half now in most games. I think they should just take the game to Argentina. It's boom or bust, whoever wins goes through. Just give it a go … and let's not have penalties.”
Sources: FIFA Official
