A SMALL corner of North London will reverberate to the arrival of one of European football's biggest names tonight.

Juventus will tread the Highbury turf for the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final against Arsenal, a duel enlivened by the appearance of Gunners old boy Patrick Vieira for the visitors. In deference to Juve's visit Evening Press deputy sports editor Tony Kelly selects his five best Juve imports...

THIS look at Juventus stars from beyond Italian shores gets off to a gargantuan start.

There is no doubt that the late, great John Charles, formerly of Leeds and one of Wales' greatest footballing exports, is the best ever import to wear the black and white stripes of the bianconeri.

I'm not old enough, honest, to have seen Charles at play. But two years after his death his legend still lives on in Yorkshire, his Welsh homeland and, of course, in Turin.

After starring for Leeds United, Charles joined Juve in 1957 for a then British record transfer fee of £65,000. Comfortable at centre-back or centre-forward Charles weighed in with 93 goals in his 155 matches. His imposing physique, allied to an unruffled temperament, earned him the affectionate nickname Il Gigante Buono, the Gentle Giant.

Juventus have always welcomed players from other countries, a heritage enriched by such diverse talents as Germans Helmut Haller, Thomas Hasler and Andreas Moeller, French skipper Didier Deschamps, and Czech ace Pavel Nedved, plus rather less successfully, Ian Rush, a compatriot of Charles.

But for all the foreign legion it was Charles, who was voted the best-ever foreign player to have starred for the giants of northern Italy.

How Charles would have benefited by playing with any of the next three candidates - one from the Republic of Ireland, two from France.

Liam Brady was the darling of the Arsenal team in the late 1970s. But the midfield wonder had wanderlust as well as gold dust in his boots and he was lured to Italy in 1980. He spent two seasons at the Stadia del-Alpi, but what a brace. After each campaign Juventus lifted the scudetto, the Serie 'A title. His last appearance included the winning goal that clinched the 1982 crown. A man who could open a tin can with his left foot, Brady was a reminder that Irish football was not just boots and all.

Ironically, Brady was usurped in the Juve engine-room by a player destined to become one of Europe's midfield supernovas.

Michel Platini, the French skipper whose lineage included Italian blood, may have sashayed in midfield, but he topped the Serie 'A' scoring charts for three successive years. Besides his ability to thread a pass through the eye of a needle, he struck a phenomenal 68 goals in 147 games for Juve.

Almost a generation on, a Gallic creative force was again to the fore for the zebras. Zinedane Zidane, nicknamed Zizou, came to prominence in the monochrome colours of Juve, where for five years he held sway as a World Cup winner and multi-scudetto king. Such was his standing, it took nothing less than £47million to prise him from northern Italy to Real Madrid in 2001.

Finally, I'm heading into the back-line for my fifth import - Paolo Montero.

Nowhere near a household name as the aforementioned quartet, Montero gets the nod for his unequivocal defence. Neither as stylish as Lilian Thuram, nor as accomplished as arguably Juve's greatest defender, the homegrown Gaetano Scirea, Montero was nevertheless the granite core at the Juve back-line throughout the decade straddling the Millennium.

The centre-back possessed and practised all the dark arts of defending as you'd expect from a Uruguyan. Never willing to yield a centimetre, Montero was a master of macho malevolence, though you bet he and many others in today's game would have been given the run-around by the inestimable John Charles.