Inside the madness of Mexico's 1986 World Cup and Diego Maradona's crowning glory

The first seismic tremor of the biggest of all Mexico’s earthquakes was felt at 7.17am and 50 seconds on the morning of September 19, 1985. It registered at 8.0 on the Richter Scale.

Four minutes of heaving earth, shuddering devastation, sudden death, burial alive, fear and screaming chaos later Mexico City’s equivalent of Wall Street had been reduced to rubble. Tower blocks compressed like packs of cards.

Hospitals destroyed. Schools flattened. Apartments obliterated. Trains on the Metro plunged into terrifying darkness, with passengers left to blindly grope their way out along the tracks at risk of electrocution.

The 13th edition of FIFA’s World Cup was nine months away but the impact on the 1986 tournament was as profound as that of the government massacre of hundreds of students in Mexico City prior to the country's first hosting of this tournament in 1970.

This country and its capital were still struggling to reach a final tally of fatalities, shift the mountains of fallen buildings and shattered glass and surmount the monumental task of reconstruction when a delayed after-quake of 7.0 magnitude struck just one month and a day before the opening match.

When Bobby Robson’s England team arrived they flew into Monterrey in north east Mexico. Those of us who went first to Mexico City were shocked by the districts which resembled landscapes from the Second World War. The most graphic of these apocalyptic scenes of crumpled masonry and mangled steel were centred around a core of structures built on the sandy, shifting bed of the vast drained Lake Texacoco. No place for skyscrapers. As officialdom should have known.

As ever in disaster, the tales we heard were of enormous tragedy and inconceivable survival. The early morning timing spared countless thousands of office staff whose working day was due to begin at 7.30am. Saved by 12 minutes and 10 seconds.

Heart-wrenchingly, children were crushed by the collapse of school buildings where assembly was at 7am. We know nothing of how many of their class-mates lived by being late.

The most heartwarming story came from the wreckage of the city’s oldest hospital. It took rescuers seven agonising days to reach the nursery buried in the wreckage. Almost all the new-born babies within were pulled to safety after that whole week without feeding, water, warmth or human contact. The Miracle Of Hospital Juarez became a symbol of hope to the nation.

The extraordinary survival of one foreign tourist raised a collective smile in the face of terrible adversity. The American was taking his early-morning swim in a hotel roof-top pool which consisted of a long plastic tub mounted on top of tiles.

As the building rocked wildly the pool slid sideways from its mooring, over the edge and plunged 15 floors to the street below. All without tipping over so that when it landed it was still full of the water which cushioned the man’s fall. As he stepped out onto the pavement dripping wet onlookers burst into cheers.

There was no such act of God to protect countless working women. The destruction of a clothing factory and more than a thousand fabric workshops downtown exposed the slave labour conditions in which the garment seamstresses worked long hours in oppressive conditions for pitiful wages. Only a few were saved by colleagues digging with bare hands. A bronze statue of a woman sewing would be erected on the site.

All this highlighted a painfully slow, shambolic, life-costing reaction by the Mexican government. It was 48 hours before any public statement from President Miguel de la Madrid, who also delayed several days before accepting offers of expert disaster aid from abroad. All while the death toll kept rising, with bodies still being discovered months after. From the 5,000 which ministers in denial kept stubbornly announcing to at least 45,000.

The response of the vast majority of the 134 million population of Mexico put the government to shame. They remained optimistic, helpful, proud of their country’s history and culture. Smiling through it all and welcoming to visitors.

When we toured the city we found the central reservation of Paseo de Reforma, the broad thoroughfare which runs from the towering statue of The Lady of Independence to the historic centre, to be crammed with small tents. Each morning children emerged to go to school. Spotless clean. Tidily dressed. Boys in crisp white shirts and dark trousers. Girls in white dresses with dark blue ribbons. Mothers offered us tea, fathers tequila and talk of football.

Mexico’s team exceeded their expectations, if not their wishful thinking, by reaching the quarter-finals. Which proved to be on a par with England, yet again, thanks to a Gary Lineker hat-trick against Poland and a double against Paraguay following a dismal start to the group involving defeat by Portugal and a goalless draw against Morocco.

On to Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium and another of those pesky quarter-finals.

Before we get started on the Hand of God, this was a match as clouded in recent history as the tournament itself. Grievances were still boiling after the Falklands War four years earlier and Diego Maradona would recount how shocked he had been when the United Kingdom were proclaimed victorious after he and all his countrymen and women had been assured by their government that they were winning easily.

‘We must win the war on the football pitch,’ he told his team. Roars of Las Malvinas, Argentina’s name for Mrs Thatcher’s favourite archipelago, went up from their fans who had hospitalised several England supporters in street fights the night before.

Maradona and his merry men set about a legitimate mugging of the England footballers, with the mini-maestro creating a host of first-half chances which went untaken. Six minutes after the interval he took matters into his own hand. Literally!

As a miscued attempt at a clearance by Steve Hodge flew towards his own goal Peter Shilton and Maradona, eight inches the shorter, jumped together. It should have been no contest but the ball glanced into the net off little Diego’s fist with the referee’s view obstructed. ‘Gooooaal,’ screamed the South Americans. ‘No,’ cried the English commentators. The VAR monster was yet to be invented.

Maradona would give thanks to ‘The Hand Of God.’ Almost unnoticed at the time, most of Shilton’s team-mates were not so much protesting as grimacing at their esteemed goalkeeper ‘for not burying the little b*****d.’

Argentina’s captain would confirm that he fully expected to be battered by Shilton. Much later he hinted that he raised his arm in self-protection.

The most revealing still photograph would show that Maradona was wincing in anticipation of being banjaxed and had his eyes closed as the ball struck his hand. Accidental handball? Too late for that.

The world would be forever entranced by The Hand Of God. Just as it still acclaims his second four minutes later as the greatest World Cup goal ever. For that one Maradona set off apace from the half-way line, swerved and waltzed past half a team of England defenders, skipped aaround Shilton, rolled the ball into the net, went berserk.

The Englishmen stranded in his wake were hailed as sporting gentlemen for not hacking him down. England’s indomitable captain Bryan Robson, ruled out of the match by a shoulder dislocation earlier in the tournament, remarked icily: ‘He wouldn’t have got that far if I’d been playing.’

Gary Lineker’s late goal, his sixth of the tournament, clinched the Golden Boot for him but not was not enough to halt Argentina’s march towards a final against West Germany in which a 3-2 win secured their second World Cup.

With it all over, the people of Mexico went back to rebuilding their buildings and lives and ousting the government that failed them. Community action groups sprang to life across Mexico City and around other regions affected by the mega-quakes.

The young men who had clawed at rubble until their bare hands bled turned to construction. Water, gas and electricity were restored by ad hoc local councils. The population at large realised it no longer needed nor wanted a virtually autocratic central government which could or would not care for them.

Far from honouring any politician the public would fund a statue of Placido Domingo – who has an artistic Mexican wife - in recognition of opera’s legendary tenor financing the construction of a an entire town in a leafy enclave of Mexico City to house those rendered homeless by the mother of all earthquakes.

Come the next elections five years later the Institution Revolutionary Party was swept out of power for the first time in more than 70 years. President de la Madrid with it.

Hand Of God Goal, Greatest Ever Goal. Ultimately the biggest own goal in Mexican political history.