Cristiano to Buffon: "Not bad for a 33-year-old eh?"
The Juventus keeper said that he had to ask the Portuguese how old he was after that famous Champions League overhead kick against his current employers.
Juventus keeper Gianluigi Buffon said during an interview that he was so shocked by Cristiano Ronaldo’s stunning overhead kick in the Champions League knock-out stages in 2017-18 that he took his current teammate aside shortly afterwards just to check how old he was.
“After 25 seconds or so of the usual frustration you get when you concede a goal, I thought about what he had done to me, which was a really special goal. And I asked him: ‘Cristiano, how old are you again?’ And he replied: ‘Not bad for a 33-year-old eh? We both ended up laughing.”
Ronaldo banged in one of the best goals of his career – if not the best – in the return leg of the quarter-final of the Champions League in Turin in 2018 when he was at Real Madrid en route to a third consecutive European triumph in Kiev.
Buffon: Cristiano "an added bonus" at the end of career
Speaking to La Gazzetta dello Sport, Buffon said he was happy he was finally able to call Ronaldo a teammate rather than have to face him. “At the end of my career I have finally been given the opportunity to play with Cristiano, which is an added bonus. It’s difficult to become a better player if you don’t play with the best in the world and I always wanted to add him to the list of great champions I have played alongside,” the veteran keeper said.
“He’s a very polite person, you can see that with the way he behaves with all of his teammates. We usually take a few minutes out in each training session and it’s been a pleasure to get to know him,” Buffon said, adding that he hopes Ronaldo wins another Ballon d’Or sooner rather than later, as that would probably imply that “we have won the Champions League,” a major honour that remains conspicuous in its absence from Buffon’s glittering career.