The elegant but inconsistent Boca Juniors player has missed Maradona's first two games in charge because of club commitments. Without him, previously lethargic Argentina have played well and beaten Scotland and France.
Maradona said in a recent interview that he gets up at four o'clock in the morning to think about team selection and much of his deliberating would have been on how to introduce Riquelme without disrupting the team.
"We don't think the same way," said Riquelme in a television interview on Tuesday. "We don't share the same codes of ethics. While he is the coach of the national team, we can't work together."
The 30-year-old has been a prickly subject for successive Argentina coaches. "Riquelme always needs to be one of the main players," said former Argentina striker Jorge Valdano in an interview last year. "It's impossible to have him in the team without giving him all the responsibility."
Although Riquelme's announcement was sudden, it was not entirely surprising after Maradona made public comments about his playing style last week.
Riquelme is highly sensitive to criticism -- the reason he quit for the first time after the 2006 World Cup -- and believes firmly in the so-called "codes of football" under which players and coaches should not talk about each other outside the dressing-room.
Last year, he fell out with Boca Juniors team mate Julio Cesar Caceres, who gave an apparently innocuous interview to a radio station in his native Paraguay about Riquelme's loss of form.
Riquelme's goal celebrations often have an air of defiance about them as he pushes away his team mates, runs to the crowd and puts his hands to his ears as if to demand applause and recognition.
Maradona, who is still idolised in Argentina and almost never confronted by other players or coaches, said he was perplexed by Riquelme's outburst.
"Riquelme was on my list for the World Cup qualifiers," he was quoted as saying by the sports daily Ole on Wednesday. "Now, I've rubbed him out completely.
