Javier Pastore spoke about being coached by Diego Maradona and playing at the 2010 World Cup with the Argentina national team.
Pastore was first called up to the Argentina national team by Diego Maradona. With Maradona as coach, he would play at the 2010 World Cup with the Argentina national team. The Argentine spoke in an interview with Relevo and hinted that he will retire from football and in the same interview, spoke about Maradona. Here is what he had to say:
“You learn everything from Diego. He was a person who taught you all the time, you would sit with him to watch a training session and he would tell you how to move, he would explain to you what he does, this is why he does it, the interpretation he had of fútbol was so great that he saw everything before, he knew when the defender was going to fail, before making a control or before the ball reached you, he already knew what was going to happen.
“Few have it, just like Messi, they go ten steps ahead of the rest. Sometimes I play with my second-string friends and they tell me how you saw it or thought before, but when you play with Messi, that makes a big difference because they mark the game very differently from the masses. Maradona’s human sensibility was also different from everyone else, I have not found a player who transmits as much as him, he generated things in me that no one in soccer has ever provoked in me. Just watching him made you want to do everything right. He talked to me a lot about Italy, what you eat, how you have to behave, how to be with people from the south, from the north… He gave me so much advice.”
He was also asked why Maradona called him the “misbehaved one of football”:
“He made me play the first game in the World Cup, I came in for 20 minutes and made several nice plays at 19 years old and he told me that because I do what I want with whoever I want. Any Italian calls me the disrespectful of footbal, ‘il maleducato dil calcio’. What Diego said was the law.”
