JUST how thick is Diego Maradona, on a scale that has Stephen Hawking at one end and a Tupperware box containing some curly endive that has been left at the back of the fridge for several months at the other? I think he’s well towards the aged salad end of the scale, frankly. In Argentina they call him La Mano de Dios — The Hand of God — for that famous act of cheating against England. You wonder if a more apt description might be La Cerebro de Peter Andre.

The fat, dwarfish cokehead recently decided that he needed to recharge his batteries, get his head together for the final round of qualifying games for the 2010 World Cup finals. Diego is the manager of the Argentine national side; yes, I know you know that, but it needs to be repeated every so often because incredulity is a sly and insinuating beast. It is a little as if England had decided to appoint Benny from Crossroads as manager (and sure, okay, I suppose we came pretty close to that with Steve McClaren).

Maradona is currently shepherding Argentina towards oblivion; with any luck they will miss their first World Cup finals in 40 years, being pipped to the post by such giants as Chile and Paraguay and Ecuador. The next round of matches is less than a month away, and Maradona decided to retire to a clinic, as you do, to purge himself of any possible toxins and bad thoughts. Now, he could have chosen a clinic anywhere in the world to hole up for a few days and start plotting what to say to the press when his side get stuffed by Peru. But of the 190 or so countries in the world, Maradona chose to grace Italy with his presence. Bad idea, bad idea, fat boy.

The reason it was a really dumb idea was that Maradona is a crook, as well as being a cheat, and owes the Italian authorities at least £30m in unpaid taxes, dating from the time he played for FC Napoli. So far, despite repeated demands and imprecations from the Italians, Maradona has paid back only about £38,000 of his debt, or a bit more than 0.1% of his total bill. So he’s sitting in his expensive room somewhere in the shaded pink hills of the Dolomites, maybe relaxing after a coconut milk bath and massage, and there’s a sharp rap at the door. It’s the local old bill, and they’ve come to fleece him of his possessions.

This is embarrassing enough, but it’s what the Bolzano authorities take from him that really brings a smile to the lips. They take his lovely, expensive earrings, the nice ones he likes to wear after watching his team lose 3-0 at home to Tierra Del Fuego or the Galapagos or whomsoever. His special earrings he wears on a big night out. What a jessie. I am still not sure why the Italians didn’t arrest him and bung him in prison for a few months, although I’m glad they didn’t, because that would probably mean that the Argies got a new manager and would qualify for South Africa after all. Come on, none of us (south of Jedburgh, at least) wants that. No, it’s enough that they took away his earrings and left him whining at the injustice of it all in his clinic. Diego, incidentally, argues that Napoli should pay his tax bill for him. Quite right: I think they should pay mine, too. And Ken Dodd’s.

God alone knows what possessed the Argentinians to allow him to manage the national side. It’s true that he has been after the job for quite a while, and in 2000 offered to do it for free. Nobody was terribly interested, to tell the truth: in Buenos Aires he is viewed much as we view Paul Gascoigne — as a loveable imbecile who was once very good at football and is now a sadly troubled maniac living on a planet very, very far from Earth.

Shortly after kindly offering to manage one of the best teams in the world, Maradona had a cocaine-induced heart attack, suffered liver failure as a consequence of being a chronic pisshead, and a gastric bypass and staples in his stomach because he was so fat. Somehow these travails persuaded the perfectly rational and sensible Julio Grondona, head of Argentina’s FA equivalent, that Maradona was the man for the national team. Captain Fats was duly unveiled to an incredulous public in late October last year. It is true that the Argies had not begun their World Cup qualifying campaign with much panache, losing to the hated political enemies of Chile. But still. You think the Chile defeat was bad, senors? Watch this, then.

Maradona has managed before, of course — and perhaps his previous record convinced Grondona that he was the man for the job. In the early and mid-1990s Diego had two stabs at management, neither of which exceeded a dozen games in charge. In his first stint, at Mandiyu de Corrientes, he presided over one win in 12 games. In his next, at one of Argentina’s top four clubs, Racing, he improved by more than 100%, recording two wins in 11 games. He has the lowest percentage success rate of any manager you care to mention, a record he has maintained with admiral devotion while running the national side. Incidentally, he is not even qualified to be a manager. He hasn’t passed any of those coaching courses, although the relevant certificates were awarded to him anyway “for the simple reason that he is called Maradona”, as the authorities put it.

This may be the last straw. Or the second-last straw. Before their crucial World Cup games against the hopeless Peru and the rather more combative Uruguay, Argentina are due to play Ghana in a friendly. This game is expected to be taken by Maradona’s No 2, the experienced (and not entirely supportive) Carlos Bilardo. If the Argies win that, don’t be surprised if Maradona is quietly eased out of the national side — which would be a great, great shame for all of us.