Alejandro Sabella's Falling Reaction

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Part of a series on 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil. [View Related Entries]

About

Alejandro Sabella's Fall is a photoshop meme inspired by the Argentinian national football team manager's fainting reaction after Gonzalo Higuain's ball struck the bar during the quarterfinal match against Belgium at the 2014 World Cup.

Origin

On July 5th, 2014, Argentina and Belgium played against each other in the quarter-final match at the World Cup Brazil, which ended with the Argentinian side's 1 – 0 victory. Along with the team's midfielder Lionel Messi, Argentinia's Gonzalo Higuain proved himself to be among the best players on the field, having scored an early lead for the team in the eighth minute into the game. In the 65th minute, the striker nearly scored a second goal but ended up striking the post. In response, Argentinian manager Alejandro Sabella closed his eyes and began falling on his back, shortly before catching himself in balance. That same day, Viner Gustavo Lema uploaded a video clip highlighting Alejandro Sabella's dramatic "fainting" reaction (shown below), which gained 8.2 million views and more than 3,800 likes in less than 48 hours.

Spread

Within the hour, Sabella's fainting reaction instantly became dubbed the latest photoshop meme from the 2014 World Cup tournament, with some of the early contributions coming from Bleacher Report^[7], ESPN and other Spanish-language sports news blogs. According to Topsy^[10], mentions of the Argentinian manager's surname "Sabello"^[9] was tweeted nearly 300,000 times on the day of June 5th, easily doubling the volume of tweets that were measured for the keyword during the group-stage matches in the tournament. On June 6th, the meme was picked up by numerous British sports tabloids and Spanish-language news sites, including Metro^[3], International Business Times,^[4] Daily Mail^[5] and The Mirror.^[6]

Notable Examples

World Cup Mash-Ups

Sabella's fainting reaction has been also mashed up with more subtle references to similar photoshop memes from the previous games and the current tournament, such as Zinetti Zidane's infamous head-butt at the 2006 World Cup, Nigel De Jong's high kick at the 2010 World Cup South Africa and Tim Howard's Saves at the 2014 World Cup Brazil (shown below, left to right).