Buffon the bully lost his dream... and a whole lot more, too
After tainting his legacy with vile rant at ref Oliver...
GIANLUIGI BUFFON is due to retire at the end of the season but the regrettable truth is that he should have quit some time ago. At least that way we would have been spared the pathetic sight of a man whom many revere as a hero, one of football’s true greats, behaving as if he believed that he had grown bigger and more important than the game itself.
Let’s be honest about what happened at the end of the Champions League quarter-final second leg at the Bernabeu: referee Michael Oliver made a correct, fair and brave decision to award Madrid a penalty and, when Buffon saw the fine glass of his dream shatter, he reacted like a spoilt child who has been twinned with a deluded thug.
He led a swarm of enraged Juventus players crowding around Oliver and shouted and screamed abuse in his face. Buffon and his team-mates were distraught because they had been on the brink of one of the great comebacks in recent football history and now they anticipated its ruin. The level of the intimidation was such that Oliver had little choice but to show Buffon a red card.
Some, blinded by loyalty, patriotism, celebrity, sentiment or a mix of all four, have suggested the sending off was harsh. I’m sorry, but that argument defies belief. I was rooting for Juventus, too but, if he were n ot retiring, Buffon would surely be looking at much more than an obligatory one-match ban.
When it comes to fulfilling a dream, there is no exemption for being a legend. There is no protection in one’s popularity. You don’t get a free pass because everyone wants you to win the one title that has eluded you during a magnificent career. Sometimes we might wish it were otherwise but sport doesn’t work like that.
Buffon went on to compound his stupidity after the match by launching into a series of bitter personal attacks on Oliver. He appealed to the romance of his listeners and said the referee had a rubbish bag for a heart. He accused him of lacking courage. He said he should have been in the stands with his wife and kids, eating crisps.
Most bizarrely of all, Buffon raged that Oliver should somehow have protected the romance of the story that had seemed to be unfolding in front of us as Juventus mounted their brilliant comeback and wiped out Madrid’s three-goal advantage from the first leg in Turin. ‘The team gave its all,’ said Buffon after the game, as he heaped ridicule on Oliver. ‘But a human being cannot destroy dreams like that at the end of an extraordinary comeback.’
It was an interesting reimagining of the rules of the game. Buffon appeared to be arguing that the referee had failed in his duty because he had ruined the story. He was saying that, because Juventus had come desperately close to causing a huge upset at the home of the Champions League holders, they deserved to be allowed to finish the job and that anyone who stood in their way was a fool and an ingrate. Sadly for him and his apologists, sadly for all of us who wanted him to crown his career with a Champions League winner’s medal, sometimes sport does not respect the best plot lines. Sometimes, it makes dreams come true. Sometimes, it dashes them. When it dashes them, it sometimes feels cruel beyond belief but it is still sport. The game lasts 90 minutes plus injury time and Juventus could not quite hold out.
If Buffon were honest, if he had had the courage he accused Oliver of lacking, he would have raged at the Juventus defender who did not jump as high as Cristiano Ronaldo when he nodded the ball back across goal with one of his most prodigious leaps. If Buffon were honest, he would have raged at Mehdi Benatia for first allowing Lucas Vazquez to steal ahead of him, then for barging him over.
Instead, Buffon chose to blame someone else. Because that is always easier than blaming yourself. How sad that, at the end of his career, instead of taking responsibility, he shirked it. He was so intent on passing the buck he didn’t even give himself the chance to save Ronaldo’s penalty, something that might yet have rescued the tie for Juventus. He was too busy with his tantrum.
Some elements of his reaction are forgivable but his continuing bullying of Oliver is not. Perhaps one could trot out the heat-of-themoment excuse for his on-field antics as an extenuating circumstance but his continued attempt to bully and belittle Oliver after the game was disgusting. Referees have never been under more pressure, both at the highest levels of the game where their decisions are subject to more and more scrutiny, and at the grass roots where stories of them being subjected to violence seem to be becoming more commonplace.
Buffon’s behaviour will make that worse. There is no question about that. In the minds of the impressionable, it will legitimise the belittling of the referee. It will legitimise threatening the referee. It will legitimise attacking the referee. Oliver and his wife have already received death threats in the wake of his decision.
‘The mental side of refereeing has become the hardest part,’ England’s former leading official, Mark Clattenburg, said after he had seen what happened to Oliver. ‘And that is why more and more referees are leaving the Premier League younger. The refereeing itself is fine, as is the physical side, but dealing with the pressure is the challenge.
‘Howard Webb left the Premier League early, I did the same, Graham Poll was another and Phil Dowd has stepped down recently. When a senior referee leaves early, that is 20 big games a season that the younger guys, who are still learning, have to take on.’
So congratulations Gianluigi Buffon. You lost a big tie on Wednesday, you lost a dream and you lost a whole lot else besides.
Blaming someone else is always easier than blaming yourself