- What You Need To Know
- Goalkeepers before van der Sar tended to be lumbering and single-purpose.
- Van der Sar changed the game by effectively becoming an 11th outfield player.
- The real lesson in van der Sar's retirement is to go out on top.
As a boy, he never expected to play professional football.One April afternoon in 1991, Ajax Amsterdam’s goalkeeper, Stanley Menzo, limped off injured. When his replacement bounded on, you wanted to laugh. The 20-year-old Edwin van der Sar was big-eared, rail thin and dressed entirely in purple with tiny shorts. By way of warming up, he literally skipped around the penalty area. He looked like a particularly camp gymnast. Then he began to keep. Twenty years on, as Manchester United’s keeper prepares to retire next month, he has redefined his profession.
From Caveman To Superman
The pre-Sarian goalkeeper -- still found in some primitive regions of Britain -- was a hulking bear who kept goal because he couldn’t play football. He could barely kick a ball straight. He was applauded for spectacular saves. He proved the adage that "goalkeepers are crazy." He had a longer career than outfield players, but still generally quit in his midthirties before he began to look silly.Managers rarely noticed him unless he let a ball through his legs. But van der Sar changed our expectations of goalkeepers.I’ve followed him all his career. We’re a year apart in age and grew up within five miles of each other in the Netherlands. He looks just like the villagers we used to play against on windy Saturdays by the North Sea. At 6'5", he is around average height for the region, and his long, pale, gloomy face -- that of a Calvinist pastor circa 1872 -- is typical too.
As a boy, he never expected to play professional football. However, in 1988, Ajax summoned him for a trial match with its second team. The stadium was empty except for a gaggle of his friends who held up a banner that read, "van der Sar in Oranje." He would play a record 130 matches for the Oranje, Holland’s national team.
It soon turned out that he was the keeper that Holland had been looking for since the 1960s. When Johan Cruyff and Rinus Michels first dreamed up Dutch "total football," Cruyff had a vision of the perfect goalkeeper: an outfield player in gloves. It had always bothered Cruyff that keepers just stopped shots. It was a waste of a player, Cruyff thought. He wanted a keeper who could play football. Wouldn’t it be perfect, he mused, if you could combine with 11 men rather than 10, and it just happened that one of them could save a ball when necessary?
Van der Sar was that keeper -- total football’s missing link. Two-footed, adept at the one-touch pass, he could have been a professional outfield player and perhaps more than that. During the 1994 World Cup, he played in outfield during Holland’s training sessions in Florida and looked like one of its better performers. Cruyff called him “Ajax’s best attacker.”
Rewriting The Book
But he was a new model keeper in other ways too. Traditionally, keepers were praised for their saves. Van der Sar tried not to make saves. He organized his defense so that he wouldn’t need to make them. Every save meant that something had gone wrong beforehand. He positioned himself so astutely that strikers often shot straight at him. You rarely noticed him -- he was a boring keeper -- but he rarely conceded goals either. And when he had to save, he did.He also had the perfect keeper’s temperament. The Dutch call him an ijs konijn, an “ice rabbit.” This goalkeeper isn’t crazy. He says: "I sometimes see nice, quiet boys go nuts on the pitch. Then I think, people can say I’m a 'dead one,' but I don’t think those guys are 100 percent." Van der Sar rebuffs the emotion around him with a chilled irony that usually falls short of being funny.
Lastly, there was his shape: perfect for modern football. The big, burly English keeper, who could push his way through a crowded penalty area to a cross (think Arsenal’s David Seaman), was becoming extinct by the 1990s. Even in England, referees were no longer letting forwards push and foul anymore. In the new, genteel game, Seamans were redundant. The new model keeper had to be a giant gymnast -- a rare phenomenon. Van der Sar is it.
By age 24, he was Holland’s automatic No. 1 and had won the Champions League with Ajax in 1995. In 1999, he joined Juventus. The story goes that as he waited in Amsterdam airport to fly to Italy to sign, his phone rang. It was Alex Ferguson. Did van der Sar fancy joining Manchester United, one of football's biggest brand? The keeper apologized; he’d already said yes to Juventus. For years afterward, as United kept signing substandard keepers, Ferguson would regret having called van der Sar a day late.
Van der Sar probably regretted it too. At Juventus, for the only time in his career, he lost confidence and committed what the Italians called papere -- keeper’s errors. Juventus had his eyes tested. In 2001, it dispatched him to the west London neighborhood club Fulham.
A Downward Trend
In Dublin on September 1, 2001, I witnessed van der Sar’s nadir. Holland lost to Ireland and missed qualifying for the 2002 World Cup. Afterward, the keeper strode off in what, by his standards, was a state of emotion. He passed a small table that stood beside the field. It looked doomed. He lifted a long leg to administer the coup de grace. But then, instead of shattering the table, he lifted his leg an inch higher and merely flicked a plastic cup off the tabletop. That was van der Sar: the ice rabbit with perfect footwork.But his best seemed past. The former world’s greatest goalkeeper spent four years at Fulham. Meanwhile, Manchester United and Arsenal soldiered on with substandard keepers. Whereas in Holland, a keeper was expected to be an outfield player, and in Italy, an infallible shot-stopper, in England, little seemed expected of him at all. Most managers undervalue and misunderstand goalkeepers. When the sports economist Bernd Frick studied salaries in Germany’s Bundesliga, he found that keepers earned less than outfield players, despite mostly being older. Perhaps the main reason is managerial ignorance: Even great managers like Ferguson or Arsene Wenger view keeping as an alien craft, like flower arranging. Barely understanding what keepers do, they are loath to pay much for them.
Finally, in 2005, Ferguson gambled just under $4 million on van der Sar. The keeper was surprised. At 34, well past the optimal age for most players, he had thought his career was winding down. He was looking forward to returning to his amateur club and playing center forward. "Scoring goals is the most fun," he said.
In fact, his career was restarting. At United he won three straight league titles, and early one morning in Moscow in 2008, the invisible keeper finally became the hero. The Champions League final between United and Chelsea went to a penalty shootouts. Van der Sar had a bad record in shootouts, and Chelsea had spotted his fatal flaw: On penalties, he dived too often to his right. Chelsea’s first six kickers shot to his left. He didn’t save a kick. In fact, by this point, he’d deserved to lose the shootout. However, John Terry’s famous slip saved United.
Then, after six penalties, van der Sar grasped what was happening. Just before Nicolas Anelka took Chelsea’s seventh, the keeper pointed to his own left. (Here, prose as a medium fails. I urge you to watch the shootout on YouTube.) “That’s where you’re all putting it,” he was saying. Anelka froze: He’d been found out. Terrified, he patted a gentle shot to the keeper’s right. Van der Sar, smiling as he dived, stopped it. "That one, all-decisive save is yet to come," he had said years before. Here it was.
In these final years, van der Sar has kept expecting to decay. Surely his eyesight must be going? It wasn’t. "Everybody doubts themselves," he said recently. "Every writer doubts themselves, every artist doubts himself and every football player does. That is what certain players thrive on.”
Going Out On Top
By peaking so late, he has helped change the conventional wisdom about goalkeepers' careers. Football’s ideal is old heads on young legs, but that’s particularly true for keepers. Joop Hiele, van der Sar’s former keeping coach, once explained: "Goalkeeping is registering the situation, recognizing it and finding the solution. The more often you do it, the easier it gets." An older keeper decodes the structure of attacks so quickly that he has time to organize his defense. Younger keepers can’t. They have only their talent. And when they make mistakes, they start doubting themselves. That’s what happened to United’s American, Tim Howard, the club’s last failed keeper before the Dutchman.Van der Sar might have continued for even longer but for his wife’s brain hemorrhage in 2009. She has recovered well but needs regular treatment in the Netherlands. Asked when he decided to quit, he said: "Let's just say that it was playing on my mind from the moment Annemarie had her stroke." He’s now planning a stint as house-husband -- preferably after pocketing the double of league title and Champions League.
Anyway, he couldn’t go on forever (could he?). "He made the point himself. It is pointless trying to be Superman into your forties," reports Ferguson. Under the showers at work one day, Wayne Rooney lobbied the keeper to continue, but to no avail. It was left to another teammate, Rio Ferdinand, to deliver the encomium. "He’s changed my thinking when it comes to goalkeepers,” said the center-back. “If I ever become a manager, I’ll be looking for my goalkeeper to exhibit as many of Edwin’s traits as possible." And so says everyone in football.
