How do you replace a man like Gianluigi Buffon? For the past two decades, Buffon has been a mainstay between the posts for both the Italian national team and his club side, Juventus.
During that time, he’s demonstrated remarkable consistency, spending twenty years as one of the best keepers in the world. Even when Juve was relegated in 2006, he stayed with the team. He’s unquestionably a legend of the game. But the end is nigh.
It’s one of the first lessons you learn playing soccer (or most any sport): play to the whistle. That tenet is even more important in the age of VAR, when professionals know the referee can consult replay to confirm goals, at least in countries that aren’t in the Dark Ages. The Mario Mandzukic goal vs. Torino was the result of Juventus punishing its rival for not playing to the whistle in the Coppa Italia quarterfinals on Wednesday.
Papu Gomez became a club legend at Atalanta B.C. last season after his goals fired the club to a fourth-place finish in Serie A (their highest-ever league finish) and qualification for the Europa League. Hopefully you’re familiar with the forward’s goalscoring celebration, a dance which was turned into a viral sensation.
Breaking news from The Eighteen Dot Com: Marek Hamsik is in the Illuminati. There is simply no other way to explain this confluence of events from Friday. How else do you rationalize No. 17 scoring in the 17th minute for his 117th goal with Napoli in the final game of 2017, all while wearing a patch with Hamsik’s face and the No. 17 on it?
Marek Hamsik, the Slovakian midfielder who has played for Napoli in the Serie A for a decade, was honored during the match by his Italian club, which wore patches to honor him as the club’s all-time leading scorer.
Antonio Donnarumma is AC Milan starting goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma's brother. Gigi Donnarumma is a boy wonder, starting for Milan at just 18 years old. Antonio Donnarumma is, um, not that. He's 27 years old, AC Milan's third-choice goalkeeper and probably only there to keep his family and younger brother happy.
However, with Gianluigi injured and regular backup Marco Storari having injured himself during warmups, the job of seeing AC Milan past hated rivals Inter into the Coppa Italia semifinals fell to Antonio.
If Zlatan Ibrahimovic is a lion, Gaetano Letizia is a regular, domesticated house cat.
Cats are prideful animals — anything they do, they totally meant to do it. When a cat does anything wrong, like failing to properly measure a jump, the cat will always try to shake it off and pretend it was deliberate.
So far, Inter Milan has had an excellent season. A mere glance at the table going into this weekend would reveal as much, as they sat in first place, ahead of Juventus and Napoli. Going into the season, not many people expected too much from the Milanese club. A top-four finish seemed the best they could hope for.
Last week, Serie A news revolved around goals. Goals change games was the mantra. After Juventus beat Napoli, it seemed like it was all change at the top of the table.
Instead, many of this week’s most important matches were goalless. Not bad, as such, but not quite the high scoring affairs we’d hoped for.
When Zlatan Ibrahimovic arrived at Inter Milan from Juventus for nearly $30 million in August 2006, the 24-year-old Swede was thrilled over the possibility of forming a devastating and prolonged partnership with 24-year-old Brazilian striker Adriano. The two had dominated Italian football since 2004, and the Nerazzurri looked set to rule the competition for years to come with two of the world’s most feared young forwards.
Goals change games. That’s pretty much football 101. That’s how the game works. But not every goal is created equal. This week in Serie A, the true value of a goal was shown to be different on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So let’s take a look at the three goals that defined the weekend and why they differed so widely.