Ajax update on van der Sar
Goalkeeper legend flown to hospital after cerebral hemorrhage
7/7/2023, 8:16 p.m
He won the Champions League as a player with Ajax Amsterdam and Manchester United, and resigned as an official at Ajax after a disappointing season. But the holiday afterwards is anything but relaxing: Edwin van der Sar is taken to a clinic with a brain hemorrhage.
Far beyond his native Netherlands, there is great concern for goalkeeping legend Edwin van der Sar. The 52-year-old is in the hospital in intensive care after a “cerebral hemorrhage,” said van der Sars’ longtime club Ajax Amsterdam. The Dutchman is “in a stable condition”, Ajax announced an “update” “as soon as there is more concrete information”. The daily newspaper “De Telegraaf” reported that van der Sar suffered the cerebral hemorrhage while on vacation in Croatia. He was flown to the hospital by helicopter from “a small Croatian Mediterranean island”. There he will be treated.
After a disappointing season, van der Sar resigned from his position as managing director at Ajax on June 1st. After almost eleven years in management, he was empty, he wanted to calm down and distance himself, he said, and spoke of symptoms of exhaustion and fatigue. “We’ve been through some really nice things, but it’s also been an incredibly difficult period.” Ajax Amsterdam had not won a title last season and only finished third in the domestic league.
As a player, he enjoyed great success with Ajax and later with Manchester United, winning the Champions League twice (1995 with Ajax and 2008 with Manchester) and four national championship titles each. In the 1997/98 season he scored his only professional football goal from the penalty spot for Amsterdam. Van der Sar also played for Juventus Turin, where he was the first non-Italian goalkeeper in the club’s history in the 1999/2000 season. From there he moved to Fulham FC before joining United for the final years of his long career.
From 1994 to 2008, van der Sar played a total of 130 international matches for the Dutch national team. This makes van der Sar the player with the second most appearances for Oranje, only Wesley Sneijder (134) has played more often for the national team. He did not play at the 1994 World Cup, but then played in goal for the Netherlands at all world and European championships until 2008 – with the exception of the 2002 World Cup, which Oranje missed.