Zero Training, 40 Years Old, Better Than Everyone: The World’s Most Impossible Keeper.
So, listen to this. The day United won the treble, everyone celebrated except Sir Alex Ferguson because with Peter Schmeichel announcing that that had been his last ever game for United, Sir Alex now had 92 days to find a replacement for the best goalkeeper on the planet before the transfer market closed.
And unfortunately for him, he needed about 6 years. In fact, before he finally found it, he went through 13 other goalkeepers. First came Mark Bosnich who three games in bloodied his hamstring. So, in the meantime, they sent Massimo Taibi who was excellent on his debut, but then conceded 11 goals over the next three matches, letting an absolute howler against Southampton and never put on a club shirt again.
Regardless, Bosnich came back, but really on his second try, even after they put him on a diet, Sir Alex Ferguson caught him absolutely decimating the hotel’s buffet, so that was that. Add Coquillard, Houllier, and van der Gouw, and that’s five keepers just in that first season. So, in the second desperate Sir Alex broke the bank and signed World Cup winner Fabien Barthez only to quickly find that the eccentric Frenchman not only loved to smoke cigarettes, but hated being a goalkeeper.
So much so that Fergie actually let him play up front in a friendly. Yeah, regardless, as much as Barthez did good enough to lock himself as first choice keeper for three seasons, it clearly wasn’t enough. They still went for Roy Carroll and then for Ricardo Lopez, but the Spaniard as David May so kindly put it, was deaf as a brush.
So, finally, after scouting both Tim Howard and Patrick Rach, they signed Howard. Things got so bad that with United’s goalkeeping coach Tony Coton getting stick from United fans every time he went out for a pint, he went up to Sir Alex and told him, “If we’re going to get another keeper, then let me to who it is.
” However, his suggestion was a 35-year-old goalkeeper from Fulham. And strangely enough, Fergie loved that idea. Obviously, it raised a lot of questions with the board, but they insisted that it’s just 2 million quid, that it’s not even a gamble. And so, they convinced them to bring him on a 2-year contract, claiming he was just there to keep them afloat until they found a proper replacement.
But, instead, five seasons later, despite shocking his teammates with an approach to training that was rather minimalistic, in other words, not training at all, the 40-year-old Van der Sar was still between their posts, going on a streak of 1,491 minutes without conceding a goal, meaning the greatest run from any keeper in any league across any era came from a 40-year-old playing in the strongest league on the planet.
So, the question is, how could they possibly have known this would happen? Well, Fergie was hiding a little secret. You see, he’d never meant to sign Mark Bosnich. It was Martin Edwards, the club’s executive director, who brought him to Manchester, saying the three had already met and shaken hands on his signing, even though Fergie claimed he didn’t even remember such a meeting, insisting they needed to find a way to get out of the deal, since after all, Bosnich had already been at United 9 years earlier, and it had been Fergie
who sold him. The whole move was so absurd that Bosnich would turn out to be the only player Fergie ever signed twice in his 39-year career. And surprise, surprise, guess who actually wanted to sign all the way back then. Edwin Van der Sar. So much in fact that even once Bosnich had landed in Manchester, he decided to call Van der Sar no matter what, asking him to sign with him regardless.
But, once that phone call reached the Dutchman, he was already in the airport waiting for his flight to Turin. Since long before his downfall led him to Fulham, he was the most promising goalkeeper on the planet by quite a margin. Van der Sar was literally Manuel Neuer before Manuel Neuer. Look, at 20 years old, Edwin was literally just some kid getting a business degree while playing for an amateur club where he only ended up being put in goal after a year and a half of playing up front and only because he was 2 m tall. But, here’s
where things get a bit absurd. As you may imagine, as much as Edwin hadn’t joined the club with any intention of going pro, once he started playing as a goalkeeper, they quickly realized he had a hidden talent. And to his luck, not only was his uncle friends with Frans Hoek, Ajax’s goalkeeping coach, but his own manager regularly played cards with Ajax’s assistant at the time, a certain man by the name of Louis van Gaal.
Yeah, within a year, Van der Sar had joined their academy, been moved to the first team thanks to a bit of financial crisis, and suddenly, he was making his professional debut for the biggest club in the country. Ironically, after nine appearances in that first year, once Van Gaal replaced Leo Beenhakker as first team manager, it was he who basically relegated Van der Sar down to the reserves, playing Stanley Menzo in every single game of the season without a minute to spare.
But, that was part of the plan. Cruyff himself had built Menzo up to be the prototype of the modern goalkeeper. So much so that according to him, he had been the most important player in their 1987 Cup Winners’ Cup victory. However, if Menzo had been the prototype, now Van Gaal, who was basically Cruyff’s disciple, had his own team in the background preparing Van der Sar to become version 1.0.
And so, once FIFA installed the back-pass rule the following season, preventing goalkeepers from holding onto the ball in order to waste time, and forcing them to learn to use their feet, Van der Sar was deployed. Ajax had been the only club that had prepared for the modern era before it even started.
With Van der Sar commanding his defense as the first throwing through sweeper-keeper the sport had ever seen, everyone stopped and watched. Even Cruyff himself eccentrically once claimed that Van der Sar was Ajax’s best attacker, implying that every one of their attacking sequences started from him. And to make it all that more extraordinary, while the keepers from before him had fed into the stereotype that to go in goal you must be a bit crazy, Van der Sar was always calm and collected.
As Evra would say, he was the only keeper who never shouted. After a single full season in command of Ajax’s goal, Van der Sar was already getting called up for the World Cup and being named Dutch Goalkeeper of the Year, an award that he would take for four consecutive seasons starting then and there.
Though, those domestic titles were nothing. In only second ever proper season, he toyed with his opposition in the Champions League, keeping eight clean sheets in 10 games, quietly leading an incredibly young and talented squad to the final, where despite facing an AC Milan that dwarfed them with five Champions League final appearances in six years, he kept another clean sheet, breaking the competition’s all-time record, bringing the title back to Amsterdam after 22 years, and becoming the youngest goalkeeper to ever be
named the UEFA’s best of the year. Ironically, one of the few to snatch it from Peter Schmeichel. But, the worst Well, the next season, he kind of did it again. While the rest of the world was distracted debating how unlikely last season’s win had been, Ajax were already busy climbing up that same mountain with Van der Sar once again putting down one clean sheet after the other, matching his own record as he reached the final having conceded only two goals.
Meaning, one more clean sheet and Van der Sar would not only set a new record there, but it also simultaneously break the record for the least goals conceded in a winning campaign. However, that was not the case. 12 minutes in, Ravanelli scored, and even worse, in a penalty shootout, Van der Sar let in every single shot, handing out the title to Juventus.
Suddenly, whispers began going around that this modern keeper gimmick was just an excuse for the fact that he was a mediocre shot-stopper, and he didn’t help himself. That same summer, he went out to the Euros and got knocked out in a penalty shootout, once again without making a single save. And no matter how much he kept Ajax afloat for the next couple of years, as their squad got picked apart and dismantled every transfer window, even being named the club’s player of the year in ’98, then at the World Cup, as they once again got within a single penalty
shootout off of a place in a final, not a single save. But nevertheless, a year later, it happened. With Sir Alex Ferguson taking too long to make his move, Van der Sar ended up instead taking Juventus upon their promise that they’d build a new team around him, making him their first ever foreign goalkeeper, the first piece of the puzzle as they brought the modern era to the Serie A. But they lied.
As Van der Sar would recount, “They told me they wanted to play like Ajax, but my teammates did not know what to do with a ball. They’d tell me, ‘Edwin, what are you doing? Play it long.'” So, all year, despite him keeping the best defensive record in the country, seemingly all the newspapers could talk about was how lanky he looked, how he never seemed to be in complete control of his frame.
And so, once Juventus lost out to Perugia on the final day, choking the title by a single point, the media blamed him, even though now everyone seems to agree he could have done nothing to save that shot. By the summer, the narrative against him had gotten so intense that as the Netherlands lost a Euro semi-final on penalties to Italy, despite his teammates having missed two penalties in regulation time and during the shootout, he still took a lot of the blame even though he had not conceded a single goal all tournament and had even
saved one of the penalties this time. So, once that second season started with the media nicknaming him Van der Goal, the man with bare hands, he rejected an approach from Van Gaal who wanted to bring him to Barcelona insisting he had to win over the Italians. But, instead it backfired.
Juve were bottom of their UCL group as Van der Sar conceded 12 goals in the group stage alone and in the Serie A he spilled a shot that left him two points off the title. It all got so rough that after that last blunder, the club itself even had his eyes checked by a doctor and despite the board telling him that they fully trusted him and would not look for another keeper in the summer.
Only a week after that meeting, they called him to tell him that they had signed Gianluigi Buffon for a world record 53 million euros, over three times the previous record. Yet, they insisted that no decisions had been made and that you can still fight for your place. Yeah, Van der Sar didn’t buy that. At this point, already 31 years old and a mental wreck, just desperately looking for a way out of the spotlight, when Fulham’s new billionaire owner Mohamed Al-Fayed came in with a club record 10 million euro bid handing him a
millionaire contract and promising him he’d make Fulham the Man United of Southern England, it seemed like a no-brainer. So, Van der Sar called Van Gaal, who by now had moved on to manage the Dutch national team, asked him what he thought and he told him it’d be fine for him to move there for a year or so in order to get his mojo back since no matter what, once they played at the 2002 World Cup, there’d be a lot of big clubs coming for him.
However, just two months later the unthinkable happened. The Netherlands lost to a 10-man Ireland and did not qualify for the World Cup. Without the hype of the tournament backing him, what started as a sort of gap year quickly turned into four as Van der Sar fell further into obscurity with every mid-table finish.
But, of course, it was at 35 when everyone thought his only legacy would be that of a wonder kid who burned out too soon that Sir Alex came in to fix his mistake. Initially brought in as a placeholder until their other younger signing, Ben Foster, was ready to take over. Well, let’s just say Ben Foster himself quickly realized he’d have no chance.
Even though in that first year Van der Sar would only walk away with a League Cup, that had been his first trophy in seven years despite having won 12 in the seven seasons before that. And he clearly got a taste for it. So much so that the next year he began tearing down the narrative surrounding him by actually saving the penalty that clinched their Premier League title.
And that was just the beginning. In the words of Ben Foster himself, “Not a goalkeeper in the world could have done for United what Van der Sar did. He was a joke. He’d come to training maybe three days a week. Sometimes on Friday he’d walk out, get three or four volleys, pat them down, then he’d just squeeze the ball, look at the goalkeeping coach, and go, ‘That’s me done.
‘ The coach would nod, and he’d walk off. Because by that age it was all in his head. He always knew exactly what he had to do. It wasn’t a matter of practice anymore. In 2007-2008, Van der Sar opened things up by saving not one, not two, but three consecutive penalties to beat Mourinho’s Chelsea to the Community Shield. And that should have been the first sign.
Forget the fact that that year he also kept one of the best defensive records in Premier League history. Because in the Champions League, like in the good old days, he conceded only three goals on his way to the final where, this time, as things boiled down to a penalty shootout, he made sure the ending would not be the one he had become so used to.
As he explained, “Initially, I was a little too nice standing on the line, but then I learned to get in their heads. In that final, I noticed most of their shots were going the same way. I realized they had been analyzing me, that they had been told to shoot to my left, but I had analyzed them, too.
I knew Anelka usually liked to shoot to the keeper’s right, so when he approached the ball, I pointed to my left to show him that I knew their plan. I just knew that after that, he would revert back to his preferred preferred side, and the moment I pushed away the penalty, I felt like I was separated from the world for a couple seconds.
It was the best moment of my career.” To say that Van der Sar fought hard for redemption would be a disservice. He had won his second Champions League title 12 years after his first. It was the longest gap between two titles in the competition’s history. But, no matter what he said, this still wasn’t his peak.
Listen, the following year, in early November, Van der Sar conceded a goal to Arsenal. It didn’t look too memorable at the time, but then it didn’t concede another one throughout that whole month or the next, and by January, he had broken Petr Cech’s Premier League record for the longest streak without conceding. Yet, that just wasn’t enough.
So, he kept going until February, and even then, once he broke the world record that had been set by José María Balbuena in the Chilean League, the man was literally smiling at the cameras every time he survived another near miss. No Premier League goalkeeper had any business getting up to those numbers, let alone one that was closing in on his 40th birthday.
And, you know what’s the most absurd thing? He wasn’t doing this just in the league like basically every other record you’ve ever heard of. No, he hadn’t conceded in the Champions League or any other competition, either. Once he finally let one in in March, almost half a season after the previous one, he was up to 1,491 minutes without conceding a goal.
For comparison, when Kahn set the Bundesliga record, he did so at 736 minutes. Van der Sar had just achieved double that. It was such an absurd record that even after he closed out his season by losing the UCL final to Barcelona, UEFA decided to name him as the best goalkeeper in Europe no matter what, 14 years after the last time he had won that award.
Though, somehow, it still would not be enough of a consolation prize to convince the old man to retire, as he insisted on pushing through even after breaking his fingers the following season, showing back up in the PFA Team of the Year at 41 years old, not to mention reaching the fifth Champions League final of his career as the oldest to ever do it, only then calling it quits as his old pupil Ben Foster claimed that when he retired, he could have easily gone on for another two or three years, but he just got bored in the end. He was simply too
good.
