Luca Toni exits, pursued by deserved fanfare and tears

Luca Toni has scored some special goals over the last 22 years. A double for Italy against Ukraine in the 2006 World Cup quarter-final, keeping his country on track to win the competition. Thirty-one strikes for Fiorentina in the preceding Serie A campaign, making him the first Italian to win the European Golden Shoe.
That scandalous overhead kick for Vicenza against Bologna back in 2000, during his first season of top-flight football. None of those, though, felt as magical to Toni as the goal he scored on Sunday night. A goal in a game that mattered not at all.
Toni’s Verona were bottom of Serie A, with relegation long since confirmed. Their opponents, Juventus, had been crowned champions last month. Neither team had anything to gain from winning this match, nor anything to lose in defeat. For Toni, however, this was one final chance to make a memory. At 38 years old, he had announced his retirement. This was to be his last professional match.
The question of what comes next has troubled him. Toni walked away from football for a short period in 2012, resolving that it was more important to spend time with his partner, Marta, after their first child was stillborn.
Gradually, though, she encouraged him back into the game. As Toni confessed to Gazzetta dello Sport in 2013: “Running after a ball, scoring goals, celebrating and suffering in a stadium has been my whole life.”
What a life it has been. Besides the World Cup, Toni has also won the Bundesliga and the DFB-Pokal. He was the German top flight’s leading scorer in 2007-08 and has been crowned Serie A’s capocannoniere twice – most recently last season, when he became the oldest player to achieve such a feat. Toni has met the target he set himself two years ago, of crossing the 300-goal threshold before he retired. Not bad for a late bloomer, whose career only truly took off at the age of 26, when he hit the back of the net 30 times for Palermo in Serie B.
This has been a difficult final season. Between injuries and lost form, Toni had scored only five times before Juventus came to visit at the weekend. His determination to sign off on a brighter note was clear from kick-off, as he launched himself against the champions’ rotated back line. He nearly opened the scoring in the 38th minute, thudding a left-footed shot into the post. Moments later, Alex Sandro clattered into Eros Pisano inside the box. Verona were awarded a penalty – and there was no doubting who would take it.
Toni later confessed to having felt a little anxious as he stepped up to the spot, unsure whether to shoot right or left. Instead, he settled on a third path: chipping the ball right down the middle. A “cucchiaio” or “spoon”, as they say in Italy – although as one press box wag pointed out, Toni’s size 12 boots made this one more like a ladle. The striker has deployed this technique before. Toni earned Verona a draw away to Milan last March with a cucchiaio, confessing afterward that it was something he had been determined to try before he retired.
If that goal was made special by its San Siro setting, then it paled in comparison to the one he scored on Sunday. “This was the most beautiful goal of my career,” Toni said at full time. “Because it’s the goal that closes my career.”
He finishes with 324 goals across all competitions. Gazzetta billed Toni recently as “the last great Italian centre-forward” – and in a season when no domestic player has scored more than 13 times in Serie A, that description does feel rather apt.
The goals themselves, though, are only part of the picture. Toni was a true centre-forward: one who used his power and presence to hold the ball up, fight off defenders and bring team-mates into play. He reminded us of such traits in the buildup to Verona’s second on Sunday.
Toni was in a tight spot when he received the ball, facing towards his own penalty area as his team attempted to break out of its half. Quick wits and even quicker feet were required to elude a pair of opponents, Toni drawing the ball under his heel to wrongfoot Stefano Sturaro before pivoting around Leonardo Bonucci and then releasing Artur Ionita with a gorgeous outside-of-the-boot through ball.
The Moldovan followed up with a super crossfield pass of his own to pick out Federico Viviani, who smashed his shot into the top corner.
Juventus pulled a goal back with an injury-time penalty but Verona held on to win 2-1. The result might not have mattered but Toni’s part in it most certainly did.
 Substituted in the 85th minute so that he could receive a standing ovation, the forward returned to the pitch at full time for another. He was most certainly not the only person at the Bentegodi with tears in their eyes.
Toni has represented 15 different clubs in his professional career and is beloved by supporters at many of those. In Verona, however, the affection feels especially strong. He has been with Hellas for only three years and yet he is their all-time leading scorer in top-flight matches.
A banner hung by supporters on Sunday proclaimed Toni to be the new “deputy-mayor” – because not even 48 goals in three seasons could earn him promotion above Danish great Preben Elkjaer. Another one said simply: “clone him”.
If only it were that easy. “I’m not very normal,” confessed Toni at full time. How grateful Italian football has been for that fact.