Towards the end of his time as the finest footballer of the past 25 years, Diego Maradona gave an interview on his future. How about coaching, he was asked? “No,” he said, then barely 33 years old, swelling around the middle, hurting around the ankles, yearning for a dangerous fix and fading as an athlete. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t teach other players to do things that nobody but I can do.”

So what did his future hold? No clairvoyant, Maradona did not say any of the following: “Well, I might add to my fame the notoriety of earning the highest-profile doping ban in the game’s history; I might suffer grave cardiac problems before the age of 44; have a surprise meeting with a teenage son I’d never before seen in the flesh; confess to a long-term addiction to cocaine and problems with alcohol; perhaps, I’ll exile myself to one of the most ostracised countries on earth, Cuba; or have my intestines surgically stapled to reduce the ballooning effects of an eating disorder.” Or cheat death, if you want to go by some of the more ominous medical bulletins around one period when Maradona lay unconscious in a Buenos Aires hospital.

Maradona, who turned 48 last Thursday, has just been named as head coach of the senior Argentina national squad, which means he will gloriously lead or be seen to have failed a group of players who should be counted among the biggest favourites to win the 2010 World Cup.

His first game in charge is against Scotland at Hampden on November 19 and on Friday he announced he would fly to England this weekend to meet Liverpool’s Javier Mascherano and Carlos Tevez of Manches-ter United. Within 24 hours he changed his mind, deciding to stay at home to formulate his squad for Hampden instead.

Maradona has plenty to think about. He will be expected to, say, find the best way for strikers such as Sergio Aguero of Atletico Madrid and Leo Messi of Barcelona to combine, to spark within them the enthusiasm for the sky-blue-and-white flag that this particular country stirs so vividly among its supporters and, from time to time, its best footballers.

No player has channelled that as brilliantly as Maradona when galvanising Argentina to win the Mexico World Cup in 1986. That was before Aguero or Messi were born, though they have grown up with the myth-making around Maradona. Each step of their young careers attracted, from somebody, the suggestion that they might be the New Maradona, the man to help the country repeat the triumph of 22 years ago. And at each big step of their careers, at least when he’s been lucid, Maradona has been invited to judge or to ordain these players. And Maradona has been lucid for the past three years, not least in the life of Aguero, who will father Maradona’s first grandson next year.

The godfather of Argentine football is now directly answerable for its success or failure. He lobbied hard for the post once his predecessor, Alfio Basile, began running out of excuses in what has been a ropey start to their 2010 qualifiers. When Maradona had his answer from the Argentine Football Association, it came with an implicit: “Okay. You do it. You go inspire them.”

That’s logical enough: he has always had a pied-piper quality. Naturally, he’s also been told he must behave himself. He has a minder on a newly formed “committee” of managers of the national team, with a so-far vague hierarchy. The experienced Carlos Bilardo, who coached Argentina in Mexico, will sit beside his ex-captain, a player he fell out with at one stage.

Colleagues from the class of ’86, such as Sergio Batista and Jose-Luis Brown, are also on Argentina’s expanded coaching staff. Maradona’s record of instability demands a carefully placed support group. He is also an inexperienced manager, although not as raw as, say, Jurgen Klinsmann was when, taking charge of a senior team in a competitive match for the first time in his life, he led Germany in the opening game of the 2006 World Cup. In one sense, Argentina have done the modern thing in international management by appointing a dazzling former star in his 40s.

Maradona has coached before, albeit briefly and – if the figures tell anything – badly. It was the mid1990s, when he was banned from playing and a club called Deportivo Mandiyu, provincial overspenders, took him on. They were threatened by relegation.

Under Maradona, they dropped. The images remembered best from that episode remain those of a splenetic Maradona cursing a referee: “You’re a robber and a liar, and you’ve got no balls!” He was then offered another gig at Racing Avellaneda in the top flight and lost his grip on it after falling off the wagon and into a bender lasting several days.

He spent much of the next decade lurching between two postures. He would rail against authority, whether it was Fifa, who imposed the ban on him after traces of ephedrine were found in a urine sample during the 1994 World Cup, or against western capitalism, a new bee in his bonnet once he befriended Fidel Castro in Cuba. Or he would go AWOL, binged out on one thing or another. “It is a miracle he’s still alive,” said his personal physician, Alfredo Cahe, four years ago.

His comeback from that point is quite something. For two or three years now, the principal scandals surrounding Maradona have not been to do with excessive partying, but . . . well, with the sort of controversy that seems to affect international football managers from time to time. The Italian tax authorities were after him, chasing up lira from his time playing for Napoli, where he is still adored. Mostly, Maradona has been keeping appointments, building a reputation as a reliable box-office television star, an opinionated and passionate football man, with, as ever, a populist touch.

So why have a majority of football followers in Argentina been answering polls on his selection as national coach with a 60-70% thumbs-down? Many, apparently, because no job burns off a populist’s veneer as rapidly as that of a football manager.

Yet much of the respect and love held for Maradona will survive any failings in his new job. Worshippers at the Mara-doniana Church in Buenos Aires last week celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of their shrine to El Diego.

They offered thanks to his father and mother for giving life to the adopted ‘saint’. They took a phone call after midnight from Maradona himself and sang: “We will be champions again, as in ’86.”

They enjoyed the coincidence of the confirmation of his new post falling on his birthday. Those with longer memories simply felt grateful he was still among them at all.

IT’S NO JOKE – MEET THE BOSS

Paul Gascoigne England’s wild child of the 1990s, inset, was sacked after 39 days as manager of Kettering Town in 2005 – partly because of ‘excessive drinking’

Ron Noades The Crystal Palace chairman became caretaker boss of a team doomed to relegation in 1998. He moved on to Brentford, where, as chairman-manager, he won promotion to the Second Division

Dmitry PitermanThe Ukrainian-American was president of Spanish clubs Racing Santander and then Alaves. Made himself coach at both but was forced to wear a photographers’ bib to be allowed on the touchline

Gerry Saurer An Austrian hotelier, he was working in Kenya’s tourist industry and somehow he ended up as the national coach for the 1992 African Cup of Nations