Everton manager Carlo Ancelotti has paid tribute to the late Diego Maradona.
As a midfielder with Roma and AC Milan in the mid to late 1980s, Ancelotti faced off against Maradona routinely during his time in the Italian top flight.
The 1986 World Cup winner, who died on Wednesday aged 60, came up against the Blues’ boss with Napoli in the Serie A title races of 1988 and 1990.
Prior to moving to Goodison Park, Ancelotti had enjoyed a 16-month spell in charge at the former Stadio San Paolo, since renamed in Maradona’s honour.
And the three-time Champions League winning coach has nothing but warm memories of encountering the larger-than-life character in his footballing life.
“Maradona was a fantastic player, the best player on the planet at that time,” Ancelotti told evertontv.
“He came to Napoli and Napoli became the toughest opponent when I was with Milan.
“We fought for the title… Napoli with Maradona was able to win the title and he was unstoppable.
“I played against him a lot of times – sometimes I was not able to stop him. I tried to kick him, sometimes, but he was so, so strong and so fast.
“I have fantastic memories of him. If sometimes I was not correct with him, he was always composed, he never shouted.
“We were opponents for a long time but the memory I keep is that he never complained on the pitch.
“At the end of our careers, I met him two or three times. He was a really funny guy, a really good man.
“Of course, he had a very intense life. But he was – and still will be – a legend of football.
He added: “He had fantastic ability, he was fast and quick in small spaces. This creativity he had on the pitch gave him the possibility to be the best.
“His specific characteristic was to use his body really well to cover the ball. He was unstoppable one-against-one and a fantastic finisher.
“You had to be a compact team [to have a chance of limiting him] and not give him space to move and show his quality.
“He was, at that time, the only player able to win games alone and he did it a lot of times. He won the World Cup in ’86, alone.”