A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (18 page)

‘Chico, I’m dropping by with Robert Enke, we’d like to do a bit of practice.’

‘Robert Enke? Who’s that?’ asked Nuremberg’s groundsman.

All of a sudden it was funny that he wasn’t known at home. ‘I’m sure there are people in Germany asking: what, Barcelona’s signed Enke? For the B-team, or what?’ It was when he was happiest that he most liked to make fun of himself.

A few weeks later he was sitting with me for the first time in a pavement café among the gothic buildings in Barcelona’s Old Town. He leaned back in his chair to hold his face in the sunlight. ‘And a few weeks ago we thought it was the end of the world because Kaiserslautern didn’t want me.’ He couldn’t help laughing at that, too. ‘Just imagine if Kaiserslautern had wanted me. I’d probably have said yes straight away. And my
face
, if Jörg had told me a few weeks later: oh, and by the way, Barcelona would have been another possibility!’

He asked if I could recommend a Spanish teacher. That evening, back in their new home in Sant Cugat, behind the green mountains of the Collserola, he would phone the teacher straight away. After the first lesson he would give him tickets for Barça.

‘I don’t know why, but somehow I think everything’s fantastic at the moment – the city, the club, the life,’ Robert continued. The five-storey buildings stood like a rampart around the little square: no cars could be heard. The bright display at the ice-cream parlour opposite us was reflected in the glass door. ‘I’ve only been here for three weeks, but already I have the feeling I’d like to stay for a long time.’

A homeless man made his way through the rows of customers outside the café, asking for money. He was the first person to recognise Robert that afternoon.

‘
Enke, el número uno!
’

Robert replied in Portuguese: ‘Are you a Benficista?’ He couldn’t imagine that anyone in Barcelona knew him by sight.

Say a sentence in Catalan, Barça’s president Joan Gaspart suggested to Robert before his official presentation. Louis van Gaal accompanied them both into the press room. The walls were hung with small portraits of all the international players who had served Barça. Van Gaal had buttoned up his stiff white shirt under his tie, which made his enormous neck look even more impressive than usual. Robert was wearing a short-sleeved red shirt, his hair freshly clipped by one of those barbers who always cut hair too short. As a result, he looked even younger next to van Gaal.

For his presentation in Lisbon Robert had cobbled together a Portuguese sentence –
É bom estar aquí
– and he had been pleased with that. In Barcelona he spoke English and said only, ‘I am going to learn Spanish, and perhaps over time I will learn to speak Catalan as well.’ In Catalonia, where politicians used language as a weapon in the fight for independence
from
Spain, Robert felt it would have sounded subservient, transparent and false if he had said something in Catalan, especially when the club president had prompted him. He didn’t want to be used.

14. 2002: Robert with the then Barça coach Louis van Gaal
.

‘The three goalkeepers, Enke, Bonano and Valdés, are starting at nil, even if the chances are better for the first two,’ said van Gaal. ‘But everything can change.’ His voice boomed. ‘Because when I’m in charge no one has a safe place on the team.’

Robert was new in Barcelona, but already used to the fact that the coach thought ruthlessness and honesty were pretty much the same thing. Four years earlier van Gaal had won the
championship
and the Copa del Rey (the ‘King’s Cup’) with Barça, with a team that was an outstanding combination of free spirit and organisation. Even so, his gruff manner made many players and most fans wish he would go away.

I interviewed van Gaal once, when he was still working for Ajax Amsterdam. He waddled through the old Ajax training complex in his tracksuit; everything about him was enormous – his belly, his neck, his head.

‘Good morning, Mr van Gaal, I arranged an interview with you,’ I said.

‘No!’ he roared. ‘You arranged an interview with David Endt!’ Ajax’s press officer had set up the meeting.

Once he had established this to his satisfaction, van Gaal politely invited me into his office.

Ten days later, on the morning of the Champions League semi-final against Bayern Munich, he phoned me at the newspaper office. He was, once again, to the point and slightly annoyed. He had read the piece about Ajax, he told me. ‘You’ve hardly quoted me at all!’

Robert initially fought the duel with Roberto Bonano for the goalkeeper’s spot unopposed as Bonano was still on holiday. As Argentina’s substitute goalkeeper he had been to the World Cup which meant he was allowed to start training a few weeks later. Frans Hoek, the goalkeeping coach, introduced Robert to the third goalkeeper, a twenty-year-old with a serious expression and thick black hair who was moving up from the B-team. ‘Robert’s manner was cool, but he had the air of a good person,’ recalls Victor Valdés.

The first training session began. Robert’s poor Spanish and Victor’s broken English gave them a welcome excuse to do hardly any talking. The coach started a lesiurely kickabout to see what state the footballers were in after their holiday. With the eagerness of a boy who’s been allowed to join the seniors for the first time, Valdés studied Robert’s every movement. He hoped he might recognise a particular German style in him.

Six years earlier, when Robert was learning how to dive
from
Uwe Kamps, Bayern Munich played Barcelona in the UEFA Cup semi-final. Standing behind Bayern’s goal that night was a fourteen-year-old ball boy, a goalkeeper with the Barcelona youth team. His name was Victor Valdés. He saw Oliver Kahn’s powerful jumps and reflexes as he stopped a shot from Kodro and a free kick by Popescu. It had been love at first sight, Valdés said. ‘My mouth was hanging open. Whoa! I thought, and I knew: this is my goalkeeper. From that moment on Kahn was my idol.’

Valdés is sitting in the press centre of FC Barcelona’s sports city. The room is a curious hybrid, a Portakabin with two brown leather sofas. The fourteen-year-old boy is now a man with huge hands and broad arms. His black T-shirt with a life-sized eagle, its claws extended, emphasises his stature. ‘You know,’ says Valdés, ‘since the day I saw Kahn, I’ve admired the German school of goalkeeping. German goalkeepers fall much better than Spanish players after a save.’

How exactly?

He starts to explain, then gets up from the leather sofa. ‘We Spaniards just drop to the ground like a lump of meat – bump.’ Valdés lies down on the press-room floor. ‘The Germans roll.’ He does the threefold roll with both hands, not with his whole body.

By the time Robert arrived at Barcelona in 2002 he had detached himself from the old German goalkeeping model and had learned to play a much cooler, efficient, rather than spectacular game. Now here was Victor Valdés, who had just come up from the B-team, admiring him for aspects of his play that Robert had left behind.

‘Robert rolled so aesthetically.’

That’s impossible – he was meticulously careful about not making a show of his saves.

‘No, really!’ Valdés is beaming with enthusiasm. He can still clearly remember his first training session with Robert. ‘Robert was incredible. He made three or four incredible saves. I’d only seen one training match, and already I could see how much quality he had.’

In the changing-room after that first session, midfielder Gerard López came up to Robert and yelled, ‘Man of the match, man of the match!’ Then he ran out of things to say in English.

Roberto Bonano, Robert’s competitor and Barça’s number one the previous season, joined the team at its training-camp in Switzerland. Now Robert was doing the watching. Most footballers look bigger on the pitch than they do in their ordinary clothes, and Bonano was no exception. His extra-large torso looked even more enormous in his training sweater. But he was no match for his appearance. It quickly became clear that he wasn’t in any sort of form. Disappointed that the coach had only put him on the substitutes bench for the World Cup, and despondent over Argentina’s failure at the tournament, Bonano had wanted to forget all about sport in the holidays. He was paying for that now.

The season was due to start in three weeks’ time. Robert had a good feeling about it.

‘Robert, you’re standing too far back!’ called the goalkeeping coach.

‘Robert, you’ve got to take the ball with your left foot!’ ‘Robert, that was another poor pass. Concentrate harder on your feet!’

Frans Hoek, his brown hair neatly parted at the side, shared a tone of voice with his boss, van Gaal, as well as the conviction that a goalkeeper had to be the eleventh outfield player. The attack began with the goalkeeper, so he had to be able to pass, kick or throw the ball precisely and far-sightedly. Barça’s defence pushed further forward than anybody else so that the team could play its big-hearted, attacking style of football. This forced the goalkeeper to move up himself, so that the space between him and his defence didn’t get too big. During his time at Benfica Robert had gone to great pains to train himself to move his standing position to six or seven yards in front of the goal-line. And now he was supposed to play even further forward? He tried his best, even though he felt uneasy
about
it, and already Hoek was yelling again: ‘Further forward, Robert! I want you to play like van der Sar!’

‘The coaches were always telling us about Edwin van der Sar,’ Bonano recalls. ‘Van der Sar does this, and van der Sar does that.’ When the Dutch keeper caught a corner during the European Championship in 1996 in the game against Switzerland and with a precise, long drop-kick seamlessly set up a goal for Dennis Bergkamp, in a few seconds he invented the so-called modern goalkeeper, a man who ironed out the threat of a goal before it could come into being and was the initiator of his team’s attacking play.

‘I’m not Maradona,’ Robert said. ‘I have shortcomings when it comes to playing with my feet.’ But he wanted to learn. He thought the coaches at Barcelona were well-intentioned towards him. At the time he had trouble seeing the negative in anything. It was just wonderful to be in Barcelona. And given Bonano’s struggle to get in shape, he was a virtual certainty to start the season as number one. ‘Robert had a fantastic attitude,’ Hoek confirms. ‘He was very willing. He was open to criticism and instruction.’

At a pre-season tournament in Amsterdam, Bonano and Enke played a game each. Bonano looked uncertain in the 4–3 defeat against Ajax, fumbling several crosses. In the 4–2 victory over AC Parma, Robert clearly came out too late when Marco Di Vaio ran at him and scored. ‘In slow-paced training matches he coped well with the big distance between a Barça goalkeeper and the defence,’ says Hoek. ‘But in matches at competition speed it was clear that he still had difficulties with our very particular form of positional play. It was obvious that he had excellent reflexes on the goal-line, but the question no one could answer was: how long will it take him to get used to the Barça style?’

For the third match, van Gaal announced that Victor Valdés would play.

‘Robbi was bewildered,’ says Teresa. ‘Why Victor all of a sudden?’

Back home in Sant Cugat just days before the start of the season Robert and Teresa were distracting themselves with the dogs in the garden one afternoon when they heard the doorbell. They weren’t expecting any handymen or the language teacher, and they didn’t know anyone else who would have a reason to drop by and see them.

Teresa opened the door to a woman, her slim figure emphasised by a short hairdo.

‘Hi, I’m Frauke,’ she said in German.

The dogs had made more of a name for themselves in their new home than the goalkeeper had. Frauke had heard that they had taken in seven strays. She herself had two mongrels and was involved in animal protection, so as she had just been to see their neighbours she thought she would call in and introduce herself.

Her husband worked at the German consulate. Teresa and Robert were invited to the next reception at their house.

On the terrace during the party a young woman came up to Teresa and asked, ‘You’re the one with the seven dogs, aren’t you?’

‘Why, can you smell it?’

That’s how friendships are made.

In Mönchengladbach and Lisbon Teresa and Robert had lived in their own world, surrounded only by individual acquaintances. They had accepted this in the belief that that’s how things have to be when you’re a professional footballer. How was he supposed to make friends, Robert wondered: how could he know whether they valued him or just his status? In an attempt to escape people who simply wanted to get close to a footballer, he had cut himself off from everyone else as well. ‘In Barcelona it was completely different from the outset,’ says Teresa.

Susanne, the young woman with the direct question from the party at the consulate, took Teresa along to her riding-stables. As a modern pentathlete, Teresa had spent her youth on horseback. Without noticing how, and without Robert having time to wonder about motives, the Enkes soon found themselves part of a little German coterie at the stables. Sant
Cugat
is near the German School in Barcelona, which attracts a lot of Germans to the town. People who would never socialise at home become friends, regardless of profession; the feeling of being foreigners abroad is what holds them together. At the riding-stables the goalkeeper for FC Barcelona was just one more member of an ex-pat community.