Argentina’s new coach Diego Maradona announced Liverpool’s Javier Mascherano, 24, as his new captain Tuesday. Mascherano is grateful enough to laud the new coach, despite the former star’s scarcity of coaching experience, but doesn’t yet know if he’ll accept.
“It is great to have him as our manager,” said Mascherano. “We all know Diego gave us so much as a player and now we hope maybe he can give us many things as a manager as well. It’s great to have such a legend as manager of Argentina. To us he is like God. He’s the best player we’ve had in our history, the best player football’s ever had.”
Mascherano said it was now up to the players to “help him take Argentina to the top of the world.” But he admitted that he knows little about Maradona’s coaching pedigree. “The only thing I can say is he has a lot of experience in the international team and maybe we can use this experience.” And Mascherano has yet to accept the captaincy at the expense of Inter veteran Javier Zanetti: “At the moment we have a captain in Zanetti who has played for Argentina for 14 years and won 125 caps, so we need to respect that.”