PELE, MARADONA AND THE MYSTIQUE OF NO.10

Pelé made the No.10 jersey legendary Maradona made it iconic. But No.10 is also a story of how football changed

- Bibek Bhattacharya

Perhaps no other sport in the world is as frequently compared to poetry as is football. Perhaps a batsman's flick of the wrist for a cover drive would compete, or a geometry-defying sliding backhand from a tennis player. But football and poetry have always been connected at the hip, probably because so many great writers have also been footballers, or have found something in the game that mirrored their own artistry. As the British novelist J. B. Priestley once wrote, "To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut. That Hamlet is so much paper and ink."

If football is like poetry, the one player in a football team who is supposed to be the epitome of this is No.10. The No.10 is the artist of the team, the footballer who makes the attacking play, creating key passes out of thin air, or dribbles past bamboozled opponents to set up or score a goal. In football, No.10 isn't merely a number on a shirt. It is the number. The player who wears that shirt is "O Rei", the king. And last week, we lost the man who epitomised the romance, thrill and mystique of the No.10, who was the first O Rei Pelé.

Football had artists before Pelé burst on to the international scene at the 1958 World Cup. In fact, two of his senior contemporaries in world football-the Hungarian Ferenc Puskás and the Spanish Alfredo Di Stéfano-were the international stars of the 1950s, redefining the art of attacking football while playing for Real Madrid. Di Stéfano was a No.9, as befitting his role on the pitch: the striker. Puskás was a No.10, his chief talent that of sniffing out positions to take in the attacking third where he could create the most havoc. Great as they both were, they were highfunctioning cogs in an effectively devastating system of play, throughout their careers. But Pelé was something different altogether.