A personal memory of one of the greatest goalkeepers ever.
I met Gigi Buffon by mistake, and at first I didn’t even like him too much. As a child, when my passion for football wasn’t yet that strong and Juventus was my team only because my father and grandfather had passed it to me, making me fall in love with the role of goalkeeper (I still regret not having undertaken that road) had been Toldo’s senseless performance with the Netherlands at the European Championships. I didn’t even know where he played but finding him months later on the bench with the national team, with Buffon back in the starting lineup, made me turn up my nose. “What is so special about Buffon about playing as a starter instead of a goalkeeper capable of similar miracles?”I thought as I watched Italy on TV, at the time the only team I followed continuously.
Six years later my relationship with football had changed radically: my passion had grown exponentially and with it my trust in the national team; At that time my best friend and I were really convinced that we had the strongest team of all, and we tried to explain it with the most disparate arguments to the many skeptics around us. Probably they too must have reevaluated their positions. Meanwhile Gigi, who I had slowly begun to appreciate, was becoming SuperGig.
His world championship, which is hard to forget for those who were there, is inhumane.
He only concedes goals from one of his teammates and from a penalty, moreover from one of the two players who could say he played in a similar level in a World Cup. I was 14 and I didn’t remember a particular parade printed on my head, I would have seen those again in the following years highlightsbut I remember as if it were yesterday that feeling of invulnerability that Gianluigi transmitted. I was never afraid when my opponents fired, I wasn’t afraid of the (few) mistakes of those in front of me because, in my heart, I knew we couldn’t lose because in front of our door there was a SuperMan ready to save us. Perhaps, had he been the captain, he would have also raised the Ballon d’Or to the sky, in addition to that World Cup that we saw him kissing.
After the World Cup, I discovered that even the world champions can play in Serie B, that the gods are more beautiful when they descend among men, that you can see the strongest goalkeeper in the world smiling even after a save against AlbinoLeffe. The ascent to Serie A coincides with my favorite save by Gigi Buffon, I don’t know if the most beautiful ever, but certainly the one that made me definitively aware of being a witness to history: the strongest goalkeeper in modern football, perhaps in all history of football, he played for my team, I could support him, admire him every week, I was an eyewitness of something unrepeatable, a feeling that I only had when I saw Cristiano Ronaldo in a black and white shirt.
It’s 2 September 2007 and at the Sant’Elia Ranieri’s Juve, after the snowball victory in the first league match against Livorno, is suffering tremendously from Marco Giampaolo’s Cagliari. With the result 1-1, a cross from Fini started almost from the goal line and found Paolo Bianco, a future member of the Juventus staff, free in the small area; the defender kicks, hard, with a right foot on the fly. It’s a surefire shot, a shot that today would turn into xG very close to 1, but Buffon, who wasn’t covering the opposite post not even a second before, takes a dive that has nothing human about itfor the timing, strength and aggression with which he swoops down on the ball, which literally bounces away from the Juventus door. A parade impossible to reproduce, worthy of the number one of the number ones.
Year 2007, the enthusiasm on his return from B, Buffon from world champion to newly promoted, the band in his hair, the gesture of the balls at the end of the game, a save at the limits of human understanding. Thank you Gigi, thank you from the bottom of my heart ❤️ pic.twitter.com/hhfkoqAQCk
— Alex Campanelli (@Campanelli11) August 2, 2023
Juve returning from Serie B is actually a team that doesn’t seem up to its own goalkeeper: there is even talk of a possible farewell, as if Buffon were the hero Juve deserved but not the one they needed. At the time of his injury – a situation which for other colleagues of his often marked the end of their careers – perhaps someone deluded themselves that all in all Storari could have been fine too.
It is no coincidence that Antonio Conte changes everything: the man who, like no one else, has been symbolic of Juve’s rebirth after Calciopoli. When Conte calls Buffon, he puts him at the center of his project: he is the first man to start from. It is the beginning of the black and white rebirth, which coincides with the second youth of the blue goalkeeper: Juventus returns to the Scudetto, the first after relegation, and never stops again, Buffon conquers the unbeaten record in the history of Serie A and, after Italy also reminds Europe who the Goalkeeper with a capital P is, producing interventions that will go down in history, such as the save on Dani Alves in the Champions League final against Barcelona or the many miracles in the group stage against Manchester City .
My last personal flash of Gigi Buffon is related to Real Madrid-Juventus 1-3, the evening of the penalty on Lucas Vazquez, of the expulsion, of the fruit and the garbage can instead of the heart; one of the evenings in which I loved him the most. Because there was a penalty, because the reaction was disproportionate and the words after the match weren’t very elegant, but there was, and it was absolutely legitimate and acceptable, even Buffon’s scream man. In short, try to put yourself in his shoes: you are the strongest goalkeeper of your generation; you have the last chance to lift the Champions League, the only trophy you are missing, playing in a very strong team that is about to perform a titanic feat against the strongest team in Europe; suddenly, an episode makes the world collapse on you, everything disappears in the time of a whistle.
Maybe not everyone would have reacted the same way but it’s unthinkable that we would have felt differently from him, yelling at fate even when it’s clear fate had nothing to do with it. “Buffon was wrong, I’m with Buffon”so I wrote at the time, because Gigi is me, it’s all of us, Buffon is a figure linked in such an indissoluble way to the Juventus fan that his outburst is also ours, and seeing him go crazy in front of the cameras made us feel even closer .
For this, and for many other reasons, I love and will always love Gigi Buffon, because he was both divine and human, perfect and fallible, liar and sincere, overbearing and humble. Because we are all Buffons, but no one in the history of football will ever be like him.
It was really nice, during Gigi Buffon’s very long golden age, to be able to answer “ours” to the age-old question about the strongest goalkeeper in the world. The first dualism I remember is the one with Oliver Kahn, faded after the bad performance of the German in the final of the 2002 World Cup; then it was the turn of Formation, in conjunction with the European rivalry with AC Milan; in the international field the main touchstone was represented by Petr Cechwith whom Gigi found himself face to face both in the German World Cup and in the double challenge of the round of 16 of the 2008/09 Champions League between Juventus and Chelsea: 1-1 and ball in the centre, but the most important match was certainly brought home Gigi.
In the years of Inter’s hegemony the rival has become Julius Caesar, even more formidable in the years preceding the treble than in the best season in Nerazzurri history; Then Casillaschampion of everything with Spain and with Real Madrid, and finally Neuer, which can add game-changing roleplaying to trophies and performances. Buffon or Kahn? Buffon or Dida? Buffon or Neuer? Questions we’ve asked ourselves, that we’ve argued with our friends about and that we may never have a definitive answer to. We can recognize it without problems: in some seasons the goalkeepers mentioned above were actually superior to Buffon in terms of what they saw on the pitch, but now that we can observe the complete picture it is incredibly easy to realize that the way Buffon wrote history, incessant, inexorable, omnipresent, does not fear any kind of comparison.