Alejo vs pele biography

Glory days eh?

I started playing when on a wet or even worse a snowy day, the ball quickly became the weigh of a medicine ball and if you got your head to it, you had a temporary mud tattoo of the paneling and stitching to go with a sore neck for the rest of the day! Football boot came up to above your ankles and had toe caps….. a bit like modern building site safety boots!

But come 15 years old, equipped with Adidas Penerols, (traded up that season for Santiagos), I started coming into my own as a goal scorer. I played as a No.9 mostly but was by inclination and capability what we see as a No.10 nowadays.

I had a fixation with the turf inside the goal; in the days of muddy goal mouths, that bit of lush green, untrodden and usually a bit longer grass held a fascination and I just had to get the ball into it. Freudian? Well maybe. Being a working class boy in a middle class school there may have also been issues of rebellious defiance too; who knows or cares.

But I did have a knack of finding that little bit of space that seemed to live in another

•