I Dream of Gigi

Today, the Azzurri tied with Romania to stay alive in the Euro 2008. Not quite as joyous as a win would've been, but at least they're still in the hunt. Especially after another very rough call went against them. Last game, the officials allowed an offsides goal by the Netherlands to count against Italy. This time, Luca Toni scored a good header and it was tossed out when the officials wrongly called him offsides. I promise, it's not just me bitching about it. All the announcers and analysts were astounded by the poor call, too. And even with my sadly fuzzy vid caps, I can show you that Toni wasn't offsides. If he was over the white line, he'd be offsides. He's not even on the line. Fuckers.


That bad call and resulting stripped goal would've given Italy the win and nearly secured a place for them in the quarterfinals. Another ugly moment was when one of Italy's own defenders, Gianluca Zambrotta, badly misplayed a pass and allowed Romania to score a crap goal. Zambrotta is a bona fide hottie and one of the D&G undie models, but we'll get back to that another day. I'm a little miffed at Zambrotta and don't want to dwell on the bad or ugly and instead want to highlight the good of the day. Actually, not so much good as great.

I told you before that Gigi Buffon was the best goal keeper in the business, and he proved it again today. With a lot of people criticizing the Italian team for being too old -- most of them are over 30 -- big guy Buffon proved he's not too old to beat the twenty-somethings. He had a few brilliant and crucial saves in the first half of the match. But in the final ten minutes, the officials awarded a penalty kick to Romanian striker Mutu. With the match already tied at 1-1, that should've been lights out for Italy. But Gigi saved the day big time when he totally denied Mutu. It was so demoralizing that Mutu couldn't recover. He nearly broke down into tears several times on the field and had to be removed from the game after a couple of minutes when he still couldn't pull his shit back in order. Of course, I love such a spectacle, and since I also adore Gigi, I took pictures of the whole thing. Gigi breathes and gets ready, Gigi saves(!!), Mutu crumbles, Mutu crumbles some more, poor thing, and Gigi celebrates and is the big hero of the day.


That's right. Give yourself a hand, Cap'n.


And this one, it really has no relevance; it's just for my personal enjoyment because, you know, Gigi's hot.


Also deserving a hand today is Christian Panucci, a defender who managed to score Italy's sole goal today. Not shockingly, he's quite a looker, so I'll give him his due tomorrow or so, then maybe swing back around to Zambrotta and more of those D&G ads when I'm done being mad at him.