Manchester United Players : Edwin Van Der Sar
Starting off with our Player Profiles section of the blog (yet another addition) and further reason to make this your one-stop resource for all things ManYoo. Sure I don’t have no league tables and dirty statistics for you, but I’ll get right to them soon enough.
So our man at the back, the reliable dutchman Edwin Van der Sar. He is celebrating hsi 36th birthday today …so Happy Birthday to him! Here’s a little info on him:
He was born in a place called Voorhout in the Netherlands on October 29, 1970.
United’s desperate bid to find a worthy successor to Peter Schmeichel has been well documented. And in the summer of 2005 they turned to giant Edwin van der Sar.
United had tried to sign the Dutchman in the past without success, and considering their goalkeeping problems in the interim it was certainly a mistake to miss out.
Van der Sar showed in his first few months at Old Trafford that he is an immense goalkeeper, commanding in his area and athletic and agile for such a giant of a player.
A couple of uncharacteristic errors towards the end of the year, when he was beaten at his near post against Everton and Birmingham City, were certainly masked by the match-winning performances he had already produced for the Red Devils.
Granted, Van der Sar’s age - he was 34 when joining the Red Devils - means he is more of a stop-gap measure than the long-term answer. But it is a situation most United fans would settle for after the wayward years with Mark Bosnich, Fabien Barthez, Tim Howard and Roy Carroll.
The Holland international moved to Old Trafford for an undisclosed fee on a two-year deal after spending four years with Fulham.
A goalkeeper with great agility for one so tall, he is a reliable and commanding figure between the sticks - one of Schmeichel’s main attributes.
He began his career with Ajax Amsterdam. There he won the UEFA Cup in 1992, the Champions League in 1995 and the Dutch domestic treble in 1996. Van der Sar was the first foreign keeper to play for Juventus when he made the move to Serie A. And the unfashionable Cottagers pulled off a major coup when they signed Van der Sar from Juventus in a £7million deal in August 2001. The deal smashed the club’s transfer record.
Van der Sar had been linked with a move to United, Liverpool and Arsenal before signing for Fulham, with the player stating that he had rejected the chance to move to Old Trafford. He made his debut, coincidentally, in a 3-2 defeat at Manchester United on the opening day of the 2001/02 season. Although he was at times at fault, Van der Sar generally won many plaudits for his first season in England - making 41 appearances.
With his contract due to expire in the summer of 2005, Fulham managed to tie him to a new two-year contact in January. That was despite much talk of a transfer window move to Manchester United.
But at the end of the campaign he finally agreed to move to Old Trafford after the two clubs agreed a fee. He made his United debut in a 3-0 Champions League qualifying victory at home to Debrecen and soon settled into life at Old Trafford, a colossus between the sticks.
Judging by the impact he’s had at United, one must wonder what took us so long to get him? But the sad truth is that he’s not getting any younger and at 36, probably has only an year or two left in him. Our keeper searches have been well-documented in the past and the bandwagon is set is roll again when Van der Sar retires.
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Happy Birthday Vander sa Mentor you are 36 but you are looking more like 16 years old in post Happy Birthday once again.
Comment by Gambo — November 10, 2008 @ 4:55 pm