Italy 2-0 Albania
The Juventus and Squadra Azzurra keeper entered into the legend realm today by playing his 1000th professional match. This is an extremely rare milestone to achieve and exemplifies Buffon’s consistency and stability at the highest level. Gianluigi Buffon is still considered at 39 years old, one of the best keepers on the planet.
Started in 1995, He played his entire career with two clubs: Parma and Juventus, won several Serie A titles, the 2006 FIFA World Cup with Italy and has been the charismatic keeper of the Italian national Football team for over two decades.
Although he has never won the Champions League (losing twice in the Final), his dream is to play the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia. It would be his sixth World Cup and a record among football players never reached before. He has reached several milestones in his career by playing 862 matches with clubs and 168 international caps for a total of 1000 appearances. Buffon also set a record for the most consecutive minutes without conceding a goal – 973! For his 1000th match, Buffon claimed his 426th clean sheet in his career, a world class career.
He just added: “When I made my Italy debut back in 1997, getting to this total was just a dream for me.”
The win today enables Italy to stay in contact of Spain for the group’s first place with 13 points each.
Coach Ventura added: “There’s still lots of room to improve, the boys will understand this when they look back on things and see what they could have done. This is a serious group, we approach our tasks with a great sense of responsibility and even the youngest players are always willing. We prepared well and played well. We could have scored more but we created a lot. The result is the most important thing as we follow our path, we are a great group and few national teams are as organized as ours.”
