A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (22 page)

During a break, the coach called the team together to explain the next exercise. Robert stood outside the circle of players, a few metres behind his colleagues.

‘Why don’t you join the group, when you’re part of it?’ his father asked him on the way home.

Robert didn’t reply.

‘It only makes things harder. The coach will see that and think: he’s not integrated, he’s not involved.’

Robert didn’t take up the subject.

Something tightened inside him when the team stood close together. It was only a vague feeling, but he wanted to show that he felt rejected. He wanted someone in the club to recognise how ill he was. At the same time, he didn’t want to show openly how despondent he was.

‘He went on joking during training,’ says Roberto Bonano.

‘Robert was very special,’ says Victor Valdés. ‘It was hard to tell if he was cheerful or sad. He always looked the same.’

If training went well, he became defiant. He’d show them.

At La Masía, where no one was allowed to watch, there were big holes in the green nylon tarps set up as a privacy shield. The journalists and fans peered through the holes, always ready to run away when the security men came. They watched the centre-forward Patrick Kluivert shoot on the turn, moving sublimely; his shot, as planned landed seven yards in front of the goal and bounced out of the goalkeeper’s reach. Robert was already diving, and tensed his body once more. Just before the ball flew into the corner of the net he got to it, no one could really tell how. Afterwards, still on the grass, he was filled once more with the pure joy that only a spectacular save can produce. The fans cheered, his team-mates cheered. And a moment later almost everyone forgot what they had seen.

Barça had concerns that outweighed a substitute goalkeeper’s state of mind. After six games the club was eleventh in the championship – an unbearable ranking. The team had been bought in a hurry and it lacked balance: it lacked an outstanding defensive midfield player in particular. Highly regarded internationals like Frank de Boer and Gaizka Mendieta were out of shape, and van Gaal had demoted Riquelme, the saviour, to the status of a bench-warmer. For this team with too many problems, van Gaal’s ruthless approach was exactly what they didn’t need. ‘Things got ugly,’ says Bonano. ‘The atmosphere was crazy, something different every day. Sometimes the coach was furious and he would insult a player, or else a member of the board would tear into us. Every day I tried to be happy when I went to work. But it was hard.’

In the hope of finally repairing something, at the end of October the coach switched goalkeepers. Valdés had never quite been able to shake off his youthful nervousness. Van Gaal put Roberto Bonano in his place.

Until then Bonano had been third-choice keeper at Barcelona.

‘Just three months had passed since Robert’s euphoric arrival in Barcelona,’ said Jörg Neblung, ‘and already people started writing as if it were perfectly natural that Barça would sell him at the next possible opportunity.’

After training Robert would walk the twenty metres from La Masía to the changing-rooms, his studs clicking on the tarmac. That short stretch was usually enough to make him collapse inwardly after the enormous commitment he had put into his training. The fact that he trained so well only reminded him how hopeless his situation was.

Frans Hoek, the goalkeeping coach, sometimes accompanied him. Whenever Hoek said something to him Robert always replied politely, often with a smile. But he no longer spoke first to Hoek. The coach didn’t notice. ‘After training Hoek always went straight to his computer and worked on his share transactions, or something,’ said Robert, almost shouting with rage. It took me a moment to understand what was so bad about
that
. Hoek couldn’t see how much he craved a word of praise, to be asked: how’s it going, Robert?

‘A goalkeeper has so much pressure, from inside, from outside. The goalkeeping coach should always be the friend of the goalkeeper,’ says Walter Junghans, Robert’s mentor in Lisbon.

‘Robert Enke was a loveable person with good manners,’ Hoek says. ‘Sometimes, with a goalkeeper like that, you must – figuratively speaking – throw a bucket of cold water over his head so that he wakes up and faces the hard reality of football.’

Esto no!
was Hoek’s battle-cry. Victor Valdés does a good imitation of his loud Dutch accent:
Esto nooo! Not that!
Still today Hoek is seen as one of the most competent and innovative goalkeeping coaches, but in his school you apparently don’t notice if one of your goalkeepers is suffering. ‘I sometimes said to Enke and Bonano, “You’re too nice,”’ says Hoek. ‘Football’s a hard world. As a player you sometimes have to be brutal. Victor was the only one who had a bit of
mala leche
, as they say in Spain – bad milk in his veins. A bit of the Oliver Kahn mentality, they might say in Germany. I could have wished for more rivalry between the three of them.’

Robert longed for understanding, Hoek shouted
Esto no!
Robert took it personally: Hoek didn’t like him, Hoek was treating him unfairly, Hoek bore a grudge against him because he had failed in Novelda. He no longer noticed that Hoek was just as cruelly honest with the other two keepers. ‘Hoek often came down on me too, you can be sure of that,’ Bonano says.

Hoek remains convinced that his relationship with Robert was impeccably professional. The odd tense moment of course, but it wasn’t meant personally.

Robert often rang Walter Junghans during his time in Barcelona.

Jörg, Teresa, Robert’s father and Marco complained about Hoek. They moaned about van Gaal, too, wasn’t he watching properly during training? For brief moments their fury felt
good
. But the truth, as Robert saw it, came back all too quickly. He, and he alone, was to blame. He had failed in Novelda. He had blundered, he was sure of it.

Just as Teresa regularly scribbled a few notes in her diary, he once wrote down, bluntly and without further explanation, this quote in his appointments diary: ‘It doesn’t matter whether what you believe is true. What matters is whether it helps you.’

Why couldn’t he bend reality so that it looked nicer to him? Victor Valdés had made mistakes, against Atlético, Betis, Osasuna. But Victor stayed so cool. He had a face like a mask. Nothing seemed to trouble him. Why couldn’t he be like that?

‘You’re playing in Bruges,’ Hoek suddenly told him.

After four out of six Champions League group matches Barcelona had qualified for the next stage, so the fifth game against the Belgian champions on 29 October was insignificant.

You have nothing to lose, Robert.

He tried to believe it.

A few hours before kick-off he called Teresa, as usual. ‘You could have recorded our conversation on a cassette and then just wiped it again – it was always the same,’ she says.

How are you, we went for a walk, now we’re having a coffee, right then, okay, see you tonight.

But this time he added, ‘Please wish me luck.’

Her stomach did a somersault. He had never let her wish him luck before. That only brought bad luck.

She had never felt more clearly how tormented he was by the fear of failure. And she couldn’t do anything more for him than say those few words, which she found she could barely utter. ‘I wish you a lot of luck,’ she said. She felt as if she weren’t saying the words, but spitting them out.

‘After that I felt ill.’

In Bruges, FC Barcelona wore jogging pants and tops rather than the custom-made Grisby suits customary on Champions
League
trips. Given the irrelevance of the game, the coach had left seven established players at home and instead taken along six young men from the B-team, who had no club suits. ‘Baby Barça’ was the name the press gave to the team. ‘It would be a shame if we couldn’t win against a team like that,’ said Bruges’s captain Gert Verheyen. Bruges were still fighting to make it through to the next stage.

Novelda was two months in the past. Robert Enke hadn’t played in public for seven weeks.

The Jan Breydes Stadium is the jewel in Belgian football’s crown, rectangular, narrow, the most beautiful stadium in the country. Here France and Spain contested one of the greatest games of the decade, in the European Championship in 2000. When the terraces are full, they pressurise the playing-field. The game was sold out. The fans were wrapped in winter coats and scarves. Most of the Bruges players wore shirts with short sleeves.

The game couldn’t find its direction. Baby Barça had the ball, led by an eighteen-year-old beginner with the porcelain skin of an angel and a heavenly touch – what’s his name, the fans asked one another; Andrés Iniesta or something. Bruges worked busily and with great concentration to make sure that Barça had no room to manoeuvre. The ball hardly left midfield. Robert had more than enough time to think; to remember. The game was like the one in Novelda.

Then, all of a sudden – and professional football is all about suddenness – Bruges’s Sandy Martens had sight of goal. He was still a good distance away from Robert, more than twenty yards, but Bruges wouldn’t easily get any closer, Martens felt, and he shot. Before Robert took off, just as the striker was preparing to shoot he did a little hop on the spot, with arms outstretched, as if summoning up some momentum; in truth it was just a nervous reaction, but it helped him to concentrate, to fill his body with tension before discharging it. He leapt and parried Martens’s powerful shot. After fifty-eight minutes of play he kept out a similar attempt by Verheyen, aimed at the back corner. For saves like that, goalkeepers are remembered.

In a game that splashed around rather than flowed, Riquelme, the saviour who had been demoted to the status of relief staff, put Baby Barça 1–0 up. There were twenty-five minutes left, twenty-five minutes during which Robert constantly fidgeted, his concentration at its highest level. Bruges were suddenly there again – but he never needed to intervene because there was a defender’s leg in the way. The game was nearly over. One more attack, Bruges on the left wing, a fine exchange of passes suddenly leaving two of Baby Barça’s defenders running at nothing; Ristic on the ball, free, by the corner of the box; he could shoot, instead he crosses high, fast, towards the six-yard line. The goalkeeper must come out and collect the ball, but ahead of him is a five-man buffalo-herd, three enemies, two friends, and he’ll just bounce off them if he tries to take the cross. Robert takes two steps forward, then stops. Martens is the first to get his head to the ball. The fans behind Robert’s goal jump into the air with their arms aloft, the ones with the quickest reactions already shouting ‘Goal!’ The header is firm and well directed. At the last moment Robert tips it over the bar. The fans’ hands go to their heads and they forget to shut their mouths.

‘Riquelme decided a game in which Iniesta and Enke shone,’ it said on the front page of
El Mundo Deportivo
the morning after the 1–0 victory. Francisco Carrasco, known as ‘Lobo’, the Wolf, European Cup winner in 1979 with Barça and now an analyst with
Mundo Deportivo
, wrote, ‘Enke’s performance was a message to Louis van Gaal: I’m here if you need me’, and the trainer, who was constantly barking, revealed a compassionate side. No one is emotionally one-dimensional, even van Gaal can be sympathetic, it just isn’t always so easy to spot it. He never talked in public about individual players, the trainer said at the press conference, ‘but a goalkeeper is a lonely player, which is why today he deserves a special mention: Enke was very good, in the end he saved our victory for us’.

Robert, Teresa noted in her diary, ‘no longer wanted to admit that he had played a terrific game’.

One game wasn’t going to change anything. He would remain a substitute. Bonano was now number one and playing well.
Once
a goalkeeper had ended up on the subs bench it was hard for him to come off it again; you didn’t switch goalkeeper at the drop of a hat. Three years earlier, at Benfica, Bossio had never been given another chance, just because he had once blown it during the pre-season match against Bayern Munich, and Robert had profited from Bossio’s misfortune. But not many people remember the luck they once enjoyed in the past in situations where fortune seems to be favouring others.

Quiet, brief joy such as he’d felt after the game in Bruges only ever made Robert think about how pointless everything was. The day after his magnificent display in Belgium, he devoted himself to his worries. He was the first of the Barça team to call Patrik Andersson to enquire about his health after an operation on his thigh. Robert identified with people who were having a hard time.

After lunch Robert regularly went to Manresa, half an hour to the north, inland, near the gleaming mountain of Montserrat, Catalonia’s national symbol. Teresa worked mornings at the animal shelter in Manresa. When he visited they took the shelter’s dogs for walks. They had to take most of them out individually so that they didn’t squabble and fight; they’d walk a circuit ten times in a row.

With their new friends from the German colony in Sant Cugat they drove to the beach at Sitges, they had barbecues in the garden; Robert went jogging with the men and cheered on Teresa and Dickens at horse-jumping shows – who would have thought that old chestnut horse would jump like that? It was November, and they were living in the sun. He could still forget, at least for a few hours, when he relaxed with friends. If he was suddenly absent for a moment, mid-conversation, mid-laughter, no one said anything. People always treat a professional footballer, a star, with special consideration, even friends, even if they don’t intend to.

One Sunday he rang me. ‘Have you heard what Victor’s done?’

Victor Valdés, twenty years young, a Primera División
professional
for only four months, had turned the world upside down. He was mutinying against van Gaal. After Valdés lost his place to Bonano the trainer sent him back to the B-team so that he could keep his hand in. He wasn’t having it, Valdés explained. ‘My team is the first team.’ He didn’t turn up for the B-team game against Segunda B side FC Reus. He turned off his phone.