Here we go! We have finally reached the ultimate chapter of our series, where we have discussed the top five players of all-time for Juventus in each position over the last five weeks or so. We have covered Juve’s five best goalkeepers, centre-backs, full-backs, central midfielders, trequartisti of all-time to date, and now is the time to wrap up the proceedings with a last throw of the dice.
We all know what the word “striker” suggests and how the position is used in a football field. Always eager to find the back of the net, a striker encapsulates various aspects of the game and is found in various forms with distinctive abilities in the market. Some of them belong to the genre of “target man’, some are known as dummy runners, some represent the idea of a “False No. 9” or a deep-lying forward. But what surely gets attached to all of them is the much-needed property of scoring goals.
Juventus have shared their dressing room with some of the best in the business. Kevin Parvizi, James Cormack, and this writer have voiced their favourites. After totaling the votes up and carrying out some serious mathematics, here is what we have come up with.
5. Filippo Inzaghi
“Superpippo”, as they would call him after witnessing an identical dart behind the defensive line and the sheer trickery to put the ball past the custodian. Filippo Inzaghi was a master of deceit. Born in Piacenza, Filippo could be recognised as the elder brother of Simone Inzaghi, another very popular name in the Italian footballing ecosystem. Being their chief, he had to set examples for his brother, and he did rightly so with some mojo.
After spending just one season in Atalanta and scoring a mesmerizing number of 25 goals from 34 games, Inzaghi joined arguably the best club in the country, Juventus, in 1997. It was his sixth moves in seven seasons. Although there was anxiety amongst the Juventus enthusiasts about the player’s loyalty, the amount of expectation was skyrocketing on the back of his arrival.
In a team studded by the presence of Alessandro Del Piero and Zinedine Zidane, Filippo Inzaghi made his point pretty soon. He stayed at the Piedmontese club for the next four years, playing 165 and scoring 89 goals (as per Transfermarkt) down the road.
Even though he began his individual run of winning Scudetto with Juve in the 1997-98 season, the elder Inzaghi enjoyed his best days as a professional football during his time at AC Milan, a club that signed him in 2001. Winning two Serie A titles and two Champions League there, Inzaghi bid farewell to professional football and AC Milan in 2012.