If Juventus are to win the Champions League this season, captain Gianluigi Buffon has claimed it will require a special kind of fury.
The Old Lady have surprisingly won the tournament just twice in their history but are well poised to reach the quarter-final of this season’s edition, bringing a 2-0 lead back to Turin from their clash against Porto.
Buffon has twice been a loser in the final of the competition during his time with Juventus, coming up short against AC Milan in 2003 and Barcelona in 2015 and is well placed to comment on what it takes to overcome that final hurdle.
“The competitive fury it takes for a team like us to win that tournament is absolutely critical,” Buffon told Juventus TV. “You can’t not have that, every team who wants to win needs it.
“If you didn’t have it, then a team like Barcelona would just win the competition for 10 years in a row. It is unavoidable.”
Whether or not this will be the year that the club end their lengthy await for victory in that competition remains to be seen but their recent Coppa Italia victory over Napoli means Buffon is confident in where the team are heading.
“That win shows that we have an extraordinary speed and power when it is required,” he added. “We reacted to going behind like any great team should and that all comes back to the competitive fury that is needed.”
