Andrea Pirlo: Classy video shows Italy legend was 'immune to pressure'

Happy birthday, Andrea Pirlo.

Today marks the day that one of the greatest midfielders in the history of men’s football blows out 43 candles on his birthday cake – and it’s only natural that we join in the celebrations.

Pirlo is part of a unique group of football players where their achievements and statistics in the game are, in a way, immaterial compared to the sheer joy of just watching them play the sport.

Yes, he played for Inter Milan, AC Milan and Juventus and yes, he won the World Cup and Champions League, but does that really match up to basking in Pirlo swanning around midfield?

The answer, in case you’re wondering, is an emphatic ‘no’, because the brilliance of the Italian maestro came in his ability to dictate a game of football like it was the easiest thing in the world.

Such was his sheer mastery of the beautiful game that a combination of his pitch-perfect technique and computer-like footballing brain that orchestrating a match didn’t even really make him sweat.

How many times would you see Pirlo hurdling tackles, pinging diagonal balls, slaloming past defenders and stroking free-kicks over the wall at the pace of your average Sunday stroll?

It’s the same quality that you saw in players like, say, Dimitar Berbatov in the sheer intelligence of their play seeming to slow the world down around them.

But before we truly fall head over heels in our admiration for Pirlo’s footballing class, we’ve got to hold our hands up and say that no description of his magnificence could ever truly do it justice.

As such, we couldn’t help casting our minds back to a beautiful compilation that summed up exactly the point we’re trying to make about Pirlo playing football at his own pace and nobody else’s.

That’s because a 2020