Inter's Champions League Title Puts More Pressure on Maradona

You all can call this article a strategy to draw the responsibility away from my beloved Brazil and lay it all in our next-door rivals, but I think there's no argument when I say that Milito's great performance yesterday makes the whole world turn their eyes to Maradona's Argentina and what they could bring to this 2010 FIFA World Cup.

I know, I know... Inter is not all about Milito.

Julio Cesar, Maicon and Lúcio are from Brazil and along with Chivu, Zanetti and Samuel they form the solid defense for the 2010 Champions League winners.

Samuel was called up by Maradona to defend the national colors in the World Cup, but Zanetti wasn't.

In the midfield for Inter we'll find Esteban Cambiasso, probably one of the best defense midfielders in the world today.  But wait a minute... he wasn't called up by Maradona either... hmmm... interesting.

But then we can't forget that out of the 11 starters last night for Inter we saw three Brazilians (Julio Cesar, Maicon, Lucio) and four Argentinians (Zanetti, Samuel, Cambiasso, Milito) – Chivu (Romania), Eto'o (Cameroon) and Pandev (Macedonia) complete the line-up (did you notice the lack of Italians on the starting line-up? Hmmmm.... interesting too).

Well, the point here is a squad with Milito, Aguero, Tevez, Higuain and Messi can be naturally considered the deadliest offensive line in the world today.

I truly admire Argentinian players and their style.

I was a big Maradona fan in 1986 (I even had a homemade #10 Argie jersey in '86... shhh... don't tell anyone). But after seeing so many talented Argentinian teams - counting on much better and more experienced managers - fail in international competitions in the past 20 years, I'm very skeptical of how far Maradona's team can go.

Don Diego picked his buddies to be in the world cup. He preferred Veron rather than Cambiasso and taking the 36-year old Palermo makes it inexcusable to leave 36-year old Zanetti out of the list.

I'm more than sure that Maradona loves his country and he surely wants to bring home this World Cup for many, many reasons, but among those reasons there's one that really scares the hell out of me: he thinks he's bigger than the team itself.

I don't think he understands what it is to lead a team of so many amazing players, how to bond them together and how to take them to a title.

Hey, but who am I to say that? I'm just a jealous Brazilian journalist, right? So I leave the question to you: Can Maradona keep it together and lead this incredible squad to a World Cup title?

You tell me.

Cheers.