March 5, 2009

Edwin van der Sar’s record goalless run ended last night

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 9:03 am

Ten minutes into the game against Newcastle United last night, Manchester United’s Dutch goal keeper Edwin van der Sar fumbled a ball and ended his record run of playing league football without conceding a goal, a run which lasted 1,311 minutes. Manchester United still won the match 1-2.

If Van der Sar had managed to keep a clean sheet for the entire match, he would have broken the European record which is held by Belgian goalie Danny Verlinden. Van der Sar still holds the UK professional football record.

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February 22, 2009

Ball, bikes and bridges

Filed under: Architecture,Automobiles,Bicycles,Sports by Branko Collin @ 7:54 pm

No news this weekend about the record attempts of Edwin van der Sar, the Dutch keeper playing for Manchester United who hasn’t conceded a goal for more than 1,300 hours. There’s nothing to report, because Van der Sar was rested during yesterday’s league game. His replacement promptly let a ball past, so that if Van der Sar keeps his net clean for at least one more minute he no longer has to share his league record with the rest of his defense.

The Flyswatter bridge we wrote about has been getting quite some attention in the blogosphere. Popular Mechanics talked a bit longer with architect Van Driel than we did and discovered some more flyswatter bridges in the Netherlands and France. But why, when mentioning in passing Dutch bicycle paths, do they link to a website about biking in Copenhagen?

Speaking of bikes in the Netherlands: people from Amsterdam use their bicycles more often than their cars. Worldchanging.com reports:

Between 2005 and 2007, Amsterdam residents rode their bicycle 0.87 times a day on average, compared to 0.84 trips by car. It was the first time on record that average bike trips surpassed cars, the research group FietsBeraad reported last month.

The ‘box of pixels’ at the top of this posting is not the lazy work of a photoshopper, but an actual office building made in 2007 by Dutch-Austrian architects Splitterwerk, and forms the headquarters for a firm called Prisma Engineering in Graz, Austria. Link: Bright.nl.

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February 19, 2009

‘Big 4’ record for Van der Sar

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 1:30 am

Unlike we originally claimed last week, Manchester United’s fourteenth consecutive clean sheet, against Fulham yesterday (3-0) does not mean that their Dutch goalie Edwin van der Sar got the European or even world record. The record he broke, that of Abel Resino of Atlético Madrid, was ‘only’ that of not conceding a goal for the ‘big four’ European leagues. According to Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch) those are the leagues of England, Spain, Italy and Germany.

Still awaiting Van der Sar are the European record, held by Danny Verlinden of Club Brugge, which stands at 1,390 minutes, and the world record of Mazaropi, Vasco da Gama, Brazil, at an incredible 1,816 minutes.

Photo by Austin Osuide, some rights reserved.

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