Forty years after Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” goal altered the course of England’s 1986 World Cup campaign, Peter Shilton said he had finally made peace with the episode – even if he could never fully forget it.
The former England goalkeeper, whose name had remained inseparable from one of football’s most controversial moments, admitted that time and a recent visit to Argentina had softened his feelings.
“I’ve put the beef to bed,” Shilton told The Telegraph. “It’s 40 years now. I’ve been over to Buenos Aires in recent years, and the people there were fantastic towards me. They were brilliant. Inside, I thought it was time to move on… obviously Maradona’s no longer with us.”
Yet acceptance was not the same as absolution. Maradona’s handball helped Argentina to a 2-1 victory in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final before he scored the celebrated “Goal of the Century” minutes later.
Despite winning 125 England caps and enjoying one of the greatest goalkeeping careers in English football, Shilton still found himself defined by one moment.
He remained adamant that there had been little more he could have done to prevent the opening goal.
“People say, ‘Oh, you should have knocked his head off or taken him out,’ but they don’t read the situation,” Shilton said. “I would have given away a penalty and potentially been sent off. I was getting the ball. That’s why Maradona punched it in. He would have headed it otherwise. It’s as simple as that.”
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For Shilton, the criticism had been especially frustrating because, in his view, those judging the incident rarely appreciated the split-second decisions a goalkeeper had to make.
“If I do have to risk my net and clash with somebody, it never worried me,” he said. “But on that occasion, it would have been bad goalkeeping to foul somebody and get sent off. Everyone in the stadium saw the handball except the referee and the linesman. You can’t win. I know the truth.”
Modern technology, he argued, would have produced a very different outcome. Shilton believed VAR would not only have ruled out the Hand of God goal but also disallowed Maradona’s second after a foul on Glenn Hoddle in the build-up.
“There’s critics of VAR, and sometimes it takes a little bit too long to make decisions, but neither of the Argentinian goals would have been allowed because obviously Maradona did handball it. The second goal, Glenn Hoddle was fouled right in front of the referee before the ball broke to Maradona. It would have been a free-kick.
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“I thought at the time we were just getting into our rhythm, starting to hit form, and we had a good chance of winning the World Cup. We were just cheated out of it,” he said.
Shilton also recalled one of the game’s lesser-known footnotes. Midfielder Steve Hodge, whose sliced clearance inadvertently created the Hand of God opportunity, swapped shirts with Maradona after the match without informing many of his England teammates. The shirt remained in his possession for more than three decades before being auctioned for £7.1 million in 2022.
“He came back and must have shoved it in his bag quite quickly. We probably would have ripped it up if we’d have known. But, you know, he was the only Englishman to get something out of that game because he got seven million quid. We haven’t seen Hodgie since,” he said.
Even so, the bitterness that had once defined Shilton’s relationship with Argentina had largely disappeared. While filming a documentary in Buenos Aires the previous year, he met members of the 1986 Argentina squad and even played a game of table football with them.
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“I think when we first met, there was a little bit of apprehension from their side,” he said. “But when they saw that I didn’t have any beef with them, we had a really good time. The Argentinian people were brilliant with me.”
