Four minutes separate the two most discussed goals in the history of the World Cup. They were scored by the same player, in the same match, against the same goalkeeper.
The setting
Estadio Azteca, 22 June 1986. Argentina against England in the quarter final, four years after the Falklands conflict, in a stadium holding around a hundred and fourteen thousand people, at altitude, in the middle of a Mexican afternoon.
Both sides insisted the war was not on their minds. Neither set of supporters behaved as though that were true.
Fifty-first minute
Steve Hodge sliced a clearance high into his own box. Maradona, 1.65 metres tall, challenged Peter Shilton, 1.85 metres and with his fist raised, and put the ball into the net with his left hand.
The referee, Ali Bin Nasser of Tunisia, was behind the play and had no clear view. The linesman gave nothing. The goal stood.
Maradona's later formulation, that it was a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God, is not a denial. He confirmed the handball explicitly years afterwards.
Fifty-fifth minute
He took the ball in his own half, near the halfway line, with his back to the England goal. He turned through Peter Beardsley and Peter Reid in a single movement and ran.
Sixty metres. Around eleven seconds. Terry Butcher and Terry Fenwick beaten, Shilton drawn out and gone past, the finish squeezed in from a narrow angle as Butcher lunged again.
In a 2002 FIFA public poll it was voted the goal of the century.
Why they belong together
Each country kept the goal that suited it. In England the match is the Hand of God. In Argentina it is the Goal of the Century. Both are accurate and both are incomplete.
The honest version is that a single player, inside four minutes, demonstrated the worst and the best that football contains, and never expressed much interest in being judged on only one of them.
Afterwards
Argentina won 2 to 1 and went on to win the tournament. Maradona scored two more against Belgium in the semi final, one of them almost as good as the second against England, and it is barely remembered.
He died in November 2020. The obituaries all faced the same problem, and most of them solved it by printing both goals side by side.
Why it goes on a wall
Because it is the rarest thing in sport: a moment that refuses to be tidied into a moral. Four minutes that cannot be edited without lying.