Very lucky they still have an opportunity to qualify.
Argentina stuck with Diego Maradona comedy roadshow There was a moment at Wembley when it seemed that Fabio Capello might be required to follow the lead of his predecessor and reach for an umbrella. Not to keep the rain off his head, but to protect himself from the undiluted praise hosing down from the press box.
By Jim White UK Telegraph
Published: 7:30AM BST 11 Sep 2009
For every reporter watching England qualify for next summer's World Cup finals, this was a triumph of management. It had to be. Here was an England team playing, according to one seasoned Italian observer, like Brazil, against the very opponents who two years previously had made them look like Barnsley.
With the pool of players from which to choose largely unchanged since that woeful evening in November 2007, that could mean only one thing: it was the manager who made the difference.
Sport on television In the universality of the praise, it has been largely forgotten that when Capello was appointed, there was a significant number among those who now drool who were far from welcoming. What they wanted was an English manager for the England team. To steer the national side away from the McClaren mire, they insisted, it was surely time for a local hero.
In football you should be careful what you wish for. Even as Capello has proven the wisdom of securing the services of the best available candidate, no matter his background, in Argentina they are living with the consequences of appointing the biggest of all local heroes.
When Diego Maradona became national team manager last November, every neutral could foresee it might not have been the wisest piece of decision-making by the Argentine Football Association (AFA). Choosing a former cocaine fiend with a terrifyingly addictive personality might have appeared to the rest of the world as something of a risk.
After all, the last time most of us had seen him in public had been at the 2006 World Cup, where he had stood in the VIP section at Argentina matches surrounded by a posse of pneumatic female companions, waving his shirt above his head and
revealing a girth of which a walrus might be a tad embarrassed. 
But in Argentina, when it comes to Diego Maradona, there is no such thing as a neutral. In his homeland opinion is divided about their greatest citizen into two basic camps: those who merely love him and those who worship the very ground upon which he steps.
In Buenos Aires he is a national treasure. Making him team manager was the equivalent of giving Dame Judi Dench the England job, with Stephen Fry and Michael Palin as her assistants. Though as it turned out, the AFA might have been wiser to employ that particular threesome.
This week, Argentina lost crucial World Cup qualifying matches at home to Brazil and away to Paraguay. Quite how they managed to lose when they number within their team such assets as Lionel Messi, Carlos Tévez and Javier Mascherano is perhaps a question that might have been put to Maradona. Except the manager, smelling conspiracy at every turn, is not taking questions.
Mind you, watching the way he reacted on the touchline on Wednesday in Asunción it is unlikely he would make much sense if he were. Drowning in a tracksuit several sizes too big for him, he shouted, ranted and raged with an increasing lack of coherence, seemingly incapable of diagnosing the problem, or knowing how to effect a cure. His reaction when Juan Sebastián Verón was sent off was the classic response of the failing manager: he unleashed a verbal tirade at the referee, blaming him for the team's qualification predicament.
Though it is hard to see how the official is responsible for a policy which has seen 62 players selected in nine months (yet still managing to leave out Madrid's young stars Gonzalo Higuaín and Esequiel Garay). Or for playing the diminutive Messi as a lone target man. Or for a schedule in which training starts at any time between midday and four in the afternoon, whenever it is the manager can make it out of bed.
With his nocturnal interests, you see, Diego doesn't do mornings. 
In Argentina, they have not sacked a national manager in 30 years, so he won't be going anywhere. Besides, to fire Maradona would be not so much like shooting Bambi as machine-gunning the entire Richmond Park deer herd before turning the weapon on yourself. And there is no chance of Maradona quietly admitting to his culpability and standing down. He has insisted he will see the job through to South Africa next summer.
Now fifth in the South American table, Argentina are heading towards a play-off with a team from the Concacaf group. It would take a monumental act of Diego-inspired folly for them to lose that one. And despite the possibility of a brief moment of schadenfreude, most neutrals will be hoping they succeed, if nothing else so as not to be deprived of the Maradona comedy roadshow in the finals.
For the AFA hierarchy, however, victory in a play-off would come at a terrible price: Maradona would still be in charge, thus continuing to subject them to an appointment nightmare solely of their own making.
