A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (41 page)

26. Robert with his goalkeeping rival Jens Lehmann
.

Robert didn’t know what to make of it. Adler received much better treatment in the newspapers than he did; unconsciously, Robert had transferred his resentment over this to Adler himself before the European Championship. Now Adler was revealing himself as a likeable guy.

René Adler was seven years younger than Robert, and in football seven years was a generation gap. When Robert made his debut in the Bundesliga in 1999, René was a fourteen-year-old boy sitting in front of the television in Leipzig who believed that the road Robert had followed was the path he himself had in front of him. Like Robert, René went from the East to the West to triumph in football. At the age of fifteen he went on his own to Leverkusen. Bayer’s goalkeeping coach R
ü
diger Vollborn and his wife took him into their home as a foster-son. It was a unique bond, the coach not just training his goalkeeper but bringing him up as well. While René lived far from his parents and his childhood, under the roof of a former professional goalkeeper whom he looked up to, whom he on no account wanted to disappoint, his natural characteristics were reinforced. Almost everyone who met him was won over by his sense of tact and his openness. In national youth teams at all ages he stood out as a unique talent; ‘he
had
to go to the European Championship after his outstanding season’, said Köpke. René himself hadn’t been able to believe that. ‘I had only been in the Bundesliga for a year and a half, and I thought: you must have achieved more than that to go to a European Championship,’ he says. ‘And then they make this odd decision to take me with them.’

He wouldn’t have known how to be anything but friendly and respectful to Robert ‘I didn’t see myself on the same level as Robbi,’ he says. Learn something from Lehmann and Enke, the greats, he had said to himself before the European Championship, and ‘Get a move on, and have fun.’

But having fun wasn’t as simple as that. Part of the training-camp, the team soon discovered, was a very demanding fitness course, in the guise of a ‘supporting programme’. René had to do exercises he had never done in his life, such as resistance runs on which they pulled little metal sleds behind them. On the first evening his legs hurt, on the second his back was stiff. He had to stop training and go to the physiotherapist. Robert couldn’t quite escape his suspicions about the darling of the media and noted this weakness with interest. Could it be that his rival wasn’t yet physically mature enough for international football?

The players’ wives had come along as well. The German Football Association had found them a hotel in Ascona, the same town on Lake Maggiore where the team was staying during the tournament. On his evenings off Robert met up with Teresa. She had made friends with one of the other women, a very nice young lady, she told him. The four of them could go out together.

‘What?’ Robert asked. ‘Now you want me to go out with René Adler?’

They had a good laugh with the women that evening, René said, ‘mostly at the expense of the men. We were both bungling great oafs when it came to DIY, so there were a few stories to tell.’

René began to spend more time at team meals with the clique of Mertesacker, Metzelder and Enke. Whenever Teresa and Robert did something with other people, it was with René and his girlfriend. And they met another nice woman with whom Teresa would always stay in contact: René’s mother.

For Robert, playing for Germany was the peak. But wasn’t substitute goalkeeper the best job of all? He was a valued part of the team, he experienced all the excitement in Switzerland,
the
victories and the fun, just like every other player, and he didn’t have to expose himself to the pressure of the games. ‘He was in a dazzlingly brilliant mood during the European Championship,’ Teresa recalls.

After the 2–0 win against Poland a man spoke to him in the changing-room corridor. Frans Hoek, the goalkeeping coach who had, in Robert’s view, run him ragged in Barcelona, greeted him with a smile. Hoek was now the goalkeeping coach for the Polish national team. ‘You see, you found justice after all. Now you’re the goalkeeper I saw when I brought you to Barça. I’m happy for you.’ Robert was perplexed. Hoek went on talking as if they had had a close relationship in Barcelona. According to Hoek’s internal clock they talked for three-quarters of an hour. Then he asked if he could have Robert’s shirt. Robert gave it to him, too startled to do anything else.

Four days later their lovely world was thrown into chaos when Germany lost 2–1 to Croatia. Getting thrown out at the group stage had become a possibility. Arguments flared in the team, and the debate among the players rapidly descended to tabloid level. The older players were scandalized that the younger ones had been by the pool sipping cocktails after the defeat. The leadership debate came out into the open, as it did so often during those years. Did it lead to success if a team was dominated by a few players in the authoritarian, often crude manner of the Effenberg generation, as Germany’s captain Michael Ballack believed? Or did a successful team need a flat hierarchy in which the footballers saw themselves as servants of an overarching game plan, as the younger professionals in particular saw it? Robert was glad that as a substitute goalkeeper he could remain outside the dispute. He wouldn’t have known which side he was on anyway. In principle he shared the idea of a team in which everyone helped each other rather than followed one or two leading players. On the other hand, at the age of thirty he often caught himself thinking that the older players sometimes needed to use a firm hand to ensure order.

With the best of both models – an outstanding Ballack as pack leader, and a solid team sticking to a painstakingly
elaborated
plan of action – Germany progressed, beating Portugal 3–2 in the quarter-final with their most impressive performance in years. They went on to reach the final in Vienna where they lost 1–0 to a superior Spanish side.

After the defeat in the Ernst Happel Stadium Robert lay with his legs spread on the pitch, still wearing his bile-green substitute’s jersey, and with his silver medal around his neck. In the floodlights it was no longer possible to ignore the physical changes he had undergone over the previous few years. He had become angular. Lara’s death had taken the boyish look from his face. The fact that he had recently shaved his head because he was starting to go bald at the temples reinforced the hardness of his facial expression. His body was now extremely muscular. Two years earlier he had said, ‘I was never as obsessive as Olli Kahn, I never had to work as hard as he did, because I had the talent,’ but since the prospect of playing for his country had come into view he’d trained religiously in the gym, because the not exactly innovative goalkeeping training he got with Hannover 96 wasn’t enough. As he lay on the grass, all alone among his defeated team-mates, he looked straight ahead. Lehmann’s career had been over for several minutes now. It was just up to him whether he would be Germany’s number one.

He flew to Lisbon with Teresa on holiday. They had recently bought a house there.

‘The question is, are you still coming back to Benfica when you’re thirty-five?’ asked Paulo Azevedo.

‘Of course,’ said Robert.

After a decade with Oliver Kahn and Jens Lehmann, Germany had got used to having a national goalkeeper who was a ruthless individual fighter. When the post-Kahn/Lehmann era began in August 2008 there was still a firm belief in the country that a goalkeeper had to be like those two, extremely resolute in total isolation.

At international level Robert noticed with irritation how
everything
that had been valued at club level was suddenly being turned against him: his objective style of play, his reticent, respectful manner in public. Now people were comparing him with Kahn, who had once bitten an opponent’s neck on the pitch; with Lehmann, who had tried to defeat Kahn in every interview he gave; and of course with René Adler, who daringly caught even difficult crosses, the sort Robert remained in goal for. ‘Enke has no charisma,’ Ottmar Hitzfeld concluded from these comparisons. Hitzfeld was at the time the most successful German club coach.

Robert thought he was prepared for such populist criticism. What the columnists said was of no importance in the end; what counted was the view of the national goalkeeping coach. And Köpke saw the simplicity of Robert’s game as elegance. ‘His calm manner on the playing-field impressed me. He had an incredible presence and authority, precisely because he wasn’t fidgety like the others, but objective and determined in all his moves. Once he had brilliantly resolved a situation with a striker all by himself, he went back in goal as if a save like that was the most normal thing in the world. No dramatics, nothing.’

In the first international after the European Championship, against Belgium in Nuremberg, Robert played in goal for Germany. It was a sign that the national coaches saw him as the first among three or four equals to succeed Lehmann. Germany won 2–0; Robert effortlessly accomplished the little work he had to do. When I rang him to congratulate him, the first thing he said was, ‘Unfortunately I had no opportunity to really shine.’ He was in a hurry to demonstrate his class. He could tell himself ten times that he wasn’t affected by public scepticism, but even so he felt the pressure to convince the country of his ability as quickly as possible.

But how was he to convince a public that mistook grandstanding for charisma?

‘Right,’ says Jörg, ‘but you can’t dismiss it as empty chatter if someone like Hitzfeld talks about a lack of charisma. You have to wonder: where did Hitzfeld get that from?’

Jörg reached the conclusion that it was also a question of image. With his sober goalkeeping style Robert produced fewer spectacular scenes than other goalkeepers who either took more risks to catch crosses or saved more dramatically on the goal-line. And when he gave dry, hard-faced interviews, the mass media inevitably preferred to run after René Adler with his blond surfer hair and youthful smile.

Robert listened to Jörg on the phone and got grumpy. Surely the national coach could tell without the help of smiley interviews whether or not a goalkeeper made his defenders feel secure? That was achieved with clear and objective instructions that no one could hear off the pitch.

‘Of course, Robbi,’ said Jörg. ‘But if you had a better public image you’d shake off some of the pressure you get from the media needling away at you.’

They talked about other goalkeepers with more exciting images, and Jörg tried to explain to Robert in technical terms that great saves often occurred only because at the last minute the keeper speculatively threw himself at a shot. There was nothing contemptible about that. Then in the heat of the debate a sentence slipped out that Jörg still regrets today: ‘Just try to throw yourself speculatively at a shot the way Tim Wiese does.’

Robert didn’t feel angry any more. He felt insulted.

After the European Championship, Tim Wiese of Werder Bremen had been made third-choice goalkeeper in the national team. He was a good keeper with a powerful jump that even Lehmann could only envy. The other top keepers, however, saw Wiese as a thorn in their side. He was a tabloid goalkeeper. He dived even for shots half a yard away from him; shots he could have parried standing up. But then the fans wouldn’t have marvelled at his exploits. If a solitary striker ran at Wiese, he slid like a kung fu fighter with his leg stretched out at his attacker, and the commentators cried with great excitement ‘Wiese takes the most amazing risks!’ The other keepers seethed with fury in front of the television: didn’t the media understand that it was simply a mistake to throw
yourself
so frantically at a striker? Anyone who looked carefully would notice that Wiese even turned his head away as he threw himself forward. It was easy for any striker simply to go around him.

After his thoughtless suggestion that he imitate Wiese, Jörg didn’t address the subject of image with Robert again. But he did notice that from that day onwards Robert made an effort to smile in every television interview.

But basically he remained what the British call a ‘goalkeeper’s goalkeeper’ – one who is revered by his colleagues but whose value the masses don’t fully appreciate. Against the trend, against the modern model of the ‘radical goalkeeper’ who tried to intercept every through-pass and catch every cross, Robert clung stubbornly to his idea of the ‘reasonable goalkeeper’. What use was it if a keeper only caught eighteen out of twenty long balls by audaciously running out? ‘I think it’s overstating the case for people to say a modern goalkeeper has to run to collect every through-pass. What a good keeper needs is an infallible sense for which through-ball he’s going to go out for and which one he isn’t.’

He was pretty much alone in thinking like this at a time when the next generation, the ‘radical’ players like René Adler and Manuel Neuer, were thwarting opponents’ manoeuvres far in front of goal and the last ‘traditionalists’, like Tim Wiese, were making breathtaking saves on the goal-line.

But the very fact that in autumn 2008 Adler, Enke and Wiese, three goalkeepers with very different styles, were in the national team shows how theoretical the idea is that one style is fundamentally better than another. Among strikers, the public sees it as the most natural thing in the world that there should be different types, all of whom can reach world-class status in their different ways. It’s much the same with goalkeepers. The only important thing is that a goalkeeper should act surely and consistently. In the closing months of that year, Robert Enke was the German goalkeeper who had perfected his style more than any other.

‘He never made serious mistakes, that was what marked
him
out,’ says Köpke. So in September Robert was in goal again for the World Cup qualifiers against Liechtenstein and Finland. ‘If you go through all his games in the national team, you won’t find a single goal where you could say: he should have been able to stop that ball, not even the 3–3 in Finland.’

The most important test of the year came after that game in Helsinki. The adoption agent from the youth welfare office came to Empede. She never made the Enkes feel they were being put to the test, though. The house visit was the last hurdle of the suitability procedure.