EVEN before the number of places “separating these two sides in the football pyramid” could be uttered at the start of a weekend of FA Cup action, there was a minute’s silence held before Tranmere versus Brackley Town on Friday night.

Seven-thousand miles from Diego Maradona’s birthplace on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Prenton Park fell silent.

Everybody dipped their heads and were asked to remember the “great man”.

The obituarists last week insisted, straight-faced, he had “long been forgiven” for his handball in 1986, which is presumably why the photo of him not heading it over Peter Shilton was on all the front pages last week.

But when you are asked to remember Maradona on a cold November night on Merseyside, there’s one or two tricks of the light. And sometimes the cons and swizzes make the hero worship just a little uncomfortable.

I’ll step carefully here, as Argentina is in mourning and it’s a country that gave us a goalkeeper steady enough to help Arsenal win the FA Cup in the summer. It’s an illustration of the club’s current mismanagement that Emi Martinez’s reward was to be promptly sold.

It should also be noted that reparations remain outstanding to Argentina for what Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber and, chiefly, Madonna did to Eva Peron, but they seem too polite to mention it.

Maradona, though. Put him down as the best player if you must, but in doing so understand that you are selecting a man who pulled off an ugly heist. His reaction to punching the ball into the goal was the key, a performance so convincing that he might have won the leading man award at the following Oscars had Paul Newman not been so damn good in The Colour Of Money.

In the time that’s passed, there’s been a sort of revelling in his “Hand of God” explanation; what a character! Maradona be Maradonarin’! Diego’s only gone and chatted his football fraud away with some cheeky blaspheme! Encore!

Off the pitch, he was accused of drug deals and beating his girlfriend, while he spent the last World Cup being a lad in the stands and sticking a middle finger up at anybody he could. But, hey, what about that other goal against England?

Marvellous, of course. Goal of the century, they say as if Dennis Bergkamp had never existed. Maradona’s was only the best if you didn’t think the defending was pretty limp from the bamboozled Terry Fenwick and Terry Butcher.

NB: I guess Terry was a popular name among new mums around 1960, but it just doesn’t quite sound as cool as Thierry.

Maradona was fortunate he didn’t miss as he ran past them for that goal because there were players in much better scoring positions to his left. A nicer guy would’ve passed.

He didn’t seem so nice, though.