What really fuelled him, though, was anger, bronca, fury tinged with resentment. Life in Villa Fiorito, in a struggling family of ten in a tiny corrugated-iron house on a bone-crusher's wage, was a giant kick up the backside. He had to get out or go under, and defeat was unbearable. Because he was so small and young in his first teams, he was sometimes left on the bench, and couldn't stand it. He would weep for hours, knowing he was as good as anyone, better, and could prove it.

When Cesar Menotti left him out of Argentina's World Cup squad in 1978, when he was so up for it, he got his own back by leading the youth team to victory in the World Youth Cup the next year. He did not forgive Menotti. Most of the coaches and managers he dealt with, he thought, betrayed him somehow. They held him back, or forced him to train when he preferred to sleep. One even tried to teach him a sliding tackle, down to the ground. He would never go down to the ground, unless pushed. Sometimes his longing for revenge went as far as war.

When Barcelona lost the final of the Copa del Rey, Spain's fa Cup, in 1984 to Athletic Bilbao, and a Bilbao player gave him two fingers, he started a mighty brawl on the pitch in front of the king himself. In 1986, marching out to take on England, his mind was full of Argentina's defeat in the Malvinas not so long before, and the Argentine boys who had died there, killed like little birds. It was not only his country he wanted to defend but, often, himself. The media infuriated him, to the point where he once opened fire with an air rifle on a posse of reporters who came to his house.

They hammered him over women and, especially, drugs. Those had led to a 15-month ban at Napoli in 1991 and in 1994 to his ejection from the World Cup in the United States mid-tournament, but he argued that he was largely innocent. At Barca he had got into the habit of testing himself, and found himself quite clean.

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