By Chris Wright
It didn’t take relegation flirts Hamburg long to click into gear against Paderborn in the Bundesliga last night, with the latter giving away a penalty almost directly after kick-off when defender Patrick Ziegler sent Marcell Jansen sprawling in the box with just eight seconds of the game elapsed.
The penalty is officially the fastest ever conceded in the Bundesliga, with Rafael van der Vaart taking another 64 seconds to convert the resulting spot-kick- also a Bundesliga record…
Hamburg went on to register a much-needed 3-0 away victory, thus elevating themselves clear of the dreaded drop zone.
However, as for the record books, it has since come to light that Hamburg themselves might be responsible for conceding the fastest ever penalty in the German top flight – with several sources recalling that HSV gave a spot-kick away after just six second during a game in 1996.
Unfortunately, the Bundesliga didn’t officially begin to collect such data until the start of the 2004/05 season, so it looks as though Hamburg may just get away with being on the right end of the record after all.