Casillas and Buffon mark centuries

Two of the leading European goalkeepers of recent years, Iker Casillas and Gianluigi Buffon, had reason to celebrate on Saturday after both won their 100th cap.

Centuries
UEFA EURO 2008™ winner Casillas, 28, reached his century in Spain's 2-1 defeat of Argentina, appropriately in Madrid, while 2006 FIFA World Cup victor Buffon, 31, kept his 43rd international clean sheet as Italy drew 0-0 with the Netherlands in Pescara. Only once since 2003 have either one or the other not been voted into uefa.com users' Team of the Year and both expressed their pride at reaching the milestone for the respective 2010 World Cup finalists.

Maturity
Casillas, who made his debut in 2000 having starred with Spain's successful youth teams, said: "I don't like talking about myself when the team is playing but I understand it's not an easy thing to reach 100 caps. Since I first started playing for Spain many things have changed; I've matured a lot and time has taught me many lessons."

'Important' mark
Buffon's senior international career stretches back to 1997, the year after he won the UEFA European Under-21 Championship, and revealed: "I did everything I could to be here even though I had flu earlier this week because the national team is very important to me. I'm happy about this milestone but 100 is a number like all the others so it was more important to look at our performance. It's always a good sign if you don't lose when you struggle to score, especially as we have many players who can score goals usually."