■ Porto v Juventus, Wednesday, 11.45pm UAE time
Iker Casillas is still getting used to what he calls “the change of scenery”. Half a lifetime spent with one club is bound to mean adjustments when a man moves on.
Casillas’s transfer from Real Madrid to Porto 18 months ago also implied a change of status.
Viewed from the other end of the pitch this evening, Casillas’s altered scenery will seem startling. Gianluigi Buffon, whose Juventus are in Porto for the Champions League, has never before shot his gaze the length of the field when Casillas has been his opposite number and not seen, somewhere in the vista, a Spanish flag. Madrid crowds always wave them, and the red-and-yellow bands have been bright and vivid the eight times Buffon has taken on Casillas in international matches.
Theirs is this century’s most enduring elite battle of individual footballers. Wednesday marks their 17th confrontation, quite a statistic for men who have never played in the same domestic league. For Casillas, there’s another career milestone – a 16th season of participation in the last-16 stage of the Champions League, a competition for which he was first called up as a 16-year-old schoolboy to provide cover on the Madrid bench.
Casillas has won the Champions League twice, in 2002 and 2014. He turns 36 in May, which means, for all his vast experience, he is the junior goalkeeper of the pair who joust off at the Dragao.
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The Italian Buffon turned 39 last month, and shows no signs of inching towards retirement. On the contrary, he has an unquenched thirst to match Casillas’s spread of titles. They have both won a World Cup and several domestic leagues. But Casillas trumps Buffon on the European stage, twice a champion there with Spain. Buffon has yet to win a Champions League, having lost two finals.
They have known some epic battles. There was the 2003 semi-final between Real Madrid and a Juventus. Buffon, who had joined from Parma two years earlier, saved a Luis Figo penalty and Casillas’s Madrid lost out, 4-3 on aggregate. Two years later, a stalemate after 180 minutes in a heavyweight last-16 tie went Juventus’s way thanks to Buffon’s clean sheet in Turin. That was 11 years back, by which time a consensus had formed in the game that these two, distinct in style and physical stature, were the finest pair of glovemen at work anywhere in the world.
"We have a healthy, positive rivalry," Casillas told uefa.com.
The see-saw of the sport’s international hierarchy has pivoted on that rivalry. When Casillas emerged triumphant from a penalty shoot-out between his Spain and Buffon’s Italy in the quarter-finals of Euro 2008, the reigning world champions exited the tournament. By four years later Casillas, Spanish skipper, had lifted a World Cup and two European championships, the second of them via a 4-0 routing of Italy in the final.
A few months after that, Buffon had a poor night against Bayern Munich in the Champions League. The former Bayern captain and now pundit Franz Beckenbauer declared, “Buffon looks ready for retirement.” Buffon declined that invitation. His Juventus marched on from scudetto to scudetto and, two years ago, ousted Casillas’s Real Madrid from a European Cup semi-final.
The Spaniard was the one suffering criticism by then, having been dropped from the Real team by Jose Mourinho, reinstated by Carlo Ancelotti and then finally waved off to Porto after some fans had started to jeer a man they used to adore for his 15-odd years of heroics between the posts.
By the time Italy beat Spain at last summer’s Euro 2016, Buffon was captaining the victors, while Casillas sat on Spain’s bench. He has not been selected by Spain since last summer. That, says Casillas, has helped him focus on club form.
Porto supporters have this season witnessed again and again the qualities that for so long made him Spain’s and Madrid’s sanctified shot-stopper, and one of the very few of whom it could be ever said he might even be better than Buffon.
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