GREAT players seldom make great managers, as Bobby Charlton, John Barnes, Ruud Gullit, Hristo Stoichkov, Bobby Moore, Stanley Matthews and Jurgen Klinsmann have shown down the decades.

In fact, off the top of my head, I can only really think of Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff who had success in and out of the dugout.

But, and it pains me to say this, I think we will be adding a certain Diego Maradona to that list in the very near future.

From the stories we heard in Argentina’s qualifying campaign, I had expected both team and manager to explode spectacularly in the pressurised environment of a major tournament.

Tactical errors had been rife in the build-up to South Africa, and it was widely thought that the man who single-handedly won the tournament for Carlos Billardo’s side in 1986 had no clue how to get the best out of Lionel Messi.

Now that Brazil have bowed out, Argentina look head and shoulders above anything else, and that includes the defensively-brittle European champions Spain.

I find Maradona a difficult person to admire, but I feel the more this competition goes on, the more I find myself applauding his actions.

Germany skipper Philip Lahm and midfield ace Bastian Schweinsteiger tried to start the mind games in the build-up to today’s match – clever, you might think, given the brawl that followed the last time these two sides met in the World Cup.

I’d have put money on Maradona issuing a response – but not him adopting a phoney German accent, looking straight down the camera lens and saying: “What’s the matter with you Schweinsteiger, are you nervous?”

Quality stuff, and I expect more from him in the post-match press conference today when I fully expect him to be celebrating a place in the semi-finals.