Alex Sabella: from Bramall Lane to the Maracana

[Alf Bentley]

So, do any of the other old gits on here remember Alejandro/Alex Sabella, the Argentina manager, playing for Sheffield United in the late 70s?! Incongruous or what!

I was only a teenager myself, but my grandparents lived in Sheffield and when I was up there I used to go to as many matches as I could - and Bramall Lane was the closest ground.

Sabella came to the Blades in the wake of the 1978 World Cup, with the first real wave of "exotic" foreign players: Ardiles & Villa (Spurs), Muehren & Thijsen (Ipswich), Tarantini (Birmingham)....and Sabella to Sheff. Utd.

I hadn't realised until recently that the Blades' Manager had actually gone to Argentina hoping to pick up a promising 17-year-old named Diego Maradona, but Diego was a bit too expensive, so he ended up with Sabella.

I remember Sabella as a slim, classy midfielder with longish dark hair, but not much else. A bit odd now to see him again as a much older man, bearing a resemblance to Marlon Brando in The Godfather!

Here he is setting up 2 goals for the Blunts:

He sounds like an interesting bloke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Sabella

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/28069978

I think MattP would particularly appreciate this bit:

"Alejandro Sabella was born to a wealthy, upper-middle class family in Buenos Aires' well-off Barrio Norte neighborhood. He was an excellent student at school, and was admitted to the Faculty of Law of the University of Buenos Aires, but his career as a football player eventually forced him to abandon his studies. Despite his wealthy background, as a young man Sabella was politically active in the left-wing Peronist Youth and worked to aid the urban poor in the slums: "I felt a growing need to be always on the side of solidarity and of the distribution of wealth for a fairer, more egalitarian society, in which we can all have equal opportunities."