Perhaps that, too, is a signal of something not quite right in Italian football. The Azzurri traditionally put their faith in older heads, and Dino Zoff, Buffon’s great predecessor in goal for Juventus and Italy, was 41 when he played the last of his 112 full international matches, in May 1983 – curiously also in a defeat against Sweden which pushed them towards their failure to qualify for Euro 1984. But the youngest players in Gian Piero Ventura’s starting team in Milan were a pair of 25-year-olds.
It’s worth remembering that when Italy won the World Cup in Spain in 1982 they included, as well as the 40-year-old Zoff, the 18-year-old defender Giuseppe Bergomi, who went on to win 81 caps. Paolo Rossi, who scored in every round, was 25. The other eight members of the starting XI in the final against West Germany were all also still in their twenties.
You can spend all the time you want on trawling through the statistics but there is no definitive wisdom on the timing of a switch from experience to youth in international football. Germany made a fresh start some years ago, and it worked. England are trying a similar approach at the moment but it will be another World Cup, and possibly two, before anyone knows whether those heartening wins in the under-17 and under-20 World Cups this year can be turned into the harder currency of senior trophies.
The truth emerges only in hindsight, and that is what happened to Italy this week. They clung for too long on to an older generation. A poorly chosen coach did nothing to change the pattern and was unable to galvanise the squad in the way that his predecessor, Antonio Conte, might still have managed, had he stuck around. The necessary rebuilding of the squad will now start with the replacement of Buffon by the 18-year-old Gianluigi Donnarumma of Milan.