A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  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.

  Again and again Robert found himself looking at one of the horses in particular. The animal’s coat was dull, its eyes empty. It was old, fifteen at least, and it was always brought out for the beginners, who tended to bounce hard on its back.

  He bought the horse.

  Two days before Barcelona’s first match, a Champions League qualifier against Legia Warsaw, Robert set off from training for Sant Cugat, taking the scenic route to avoid paying the two euros for the motorway tunnel just before Vallvidrera. ‘Do you want to know who’s playing?’ he said into his mobile. He didn’t wait for my answer. ‘Victor’s in goal on Wednesday.’

  He was shaken. Valdés was still a boy with no big-game experience, and athletically he was far from mature.

  ‘Victor seemed, at that moment, to be adapting best of all three goalkeepers to the Barça system’s style of play,’ Hoek explains.

  Robert forced himself to see the decision from the coach’s point of view. ‘It’s very brave of van Gaal, you have to give him that,’ he said into his phone. ‘He could have made things simple for himself and put Bonano or me in goal. But he opts for an inexperienced young goalkeeper. He must have thought about it very carefully.’

  But he could only see it in such rational terms when talking to other people. At home, he brooded. Why Victor?

  That afternoon he drove Teresa into town. They had to buy furniture for the house. It was August, and in Spain it isn’t just individual shops that close for the holidays, it’s whole towns. With mounting irritation they went from one shut-up furniture store to the next. Teresa was happy, because while they were doing this Robert forgot to brood about football.

  Teresa went to the match, even though Robert was only sitting on the subs bench. She found the executive box, full of men with gelled hair and frosty women, fascinating, albeit she didn’t take the circus too seriously.

  She had always managed to find one or two good friends among the other footballers’ wives; she just had to make the effort and she would link up with someone at Camp Nou as well. She asked one of the women if they were going out after the match. Of course, said the woman, and didn’t ask if Teresa wanted to come too.

  At Camp Nou the women behaved as if they themselves were the football team, competing for the starring roles. She was just the substitute goalie’s wife.

  Down on the pitch, Victor Valdés was demonstrating his huge talent in his first outing. He valiantly stood up to Legia Warsaw’s Cesary Kucharski when he broke through the ranks; but then against Atlético Madrid, in the first Primera División game of the season, he ran headlong out of the goal and under a misjudged cross, and the ball landed in the goal.

  Robert heard a few rumours. Valdés was preferred because he was Catalan. Van Gaal had a thing about young players; like a man possessed, he was trying to cement his reputation as a discoverer of new stars, and he favoured reckless young talent. Chat, gossip – forget it, Robert said to himself. But it was hard not to think about it. How could it be that Victor remained in goal even after a few mistakes? Why were the fans frantically applauding his every simple save when Robert just got shouted at by the trainers to use his feet, even though everyone could see that he was better with his hands than Valdés? Hands, not feet – that was the important thing.

  Teresa took him to the riding-stables. Dickens was the name they had given the exhausted horse Robert had bought, more out of love for his wife than for the animal. The riders spoke to him; he found their friendliness refreshing. He shouldn’t think about football all the time, he told himself. And a moment later he was thinking about Victor Valdés.

  * * *

  Next week, in the Copa del Rey, he would use some of his reserve players, van Gaal said. His voice betrayed him. Wound up by all the shouting and raging, it sometimes had an aggressive, barking sound, even when the coach only wanted to convey something in a matter-of-fact way. ‘You’ll have your chance there.’ To Robert it sounded like a threat. In the Copa del Rey you’ll be able to show me whether you’re really up to the task.

  Barça’s opponents were FC Novelda, bottom of Segunda División B – the Spanish Third Division. Novelda’s La Magdalena sports ground has three entrances; the green iron gate at the back is covered with graffiti: ‘Revolution Che!’ and ‘Ana, you are pretty – a boy tells you that’. FC Barcelona spent the night in Elche, in a hotel with a palm garden, a fifteen-kilometre drive away from Novelda through an area in which the ugliness of cheap warehouses contrasts with the beauty of bare mountains, and where the better restaurants lie outside the town, along the motorways. As always before a game, Robert phoned Teresa. They mechanically reeled off questions and answers – how are you, we went for a walk, now we’re having coffee, all fine, okay, we’ll see each other tonight. He had forbidden her to wish him luck.

  NINE

  Novelda

  THEY’D CLOSED OFF Sergeant Navarro Street in front of the sports grou
nd. Toni Madrigal, who had been too nervous even to read a book all afternoon, left his car at home and walked. It was just ten minutes to the sports ground. Madrigal was early: he wanted to meet a friend from Valencia at the ticket desk before the game.

  Novelda – population twenty-seven thousand, reasonable income from marble and wine – is like an onion, with skins of apartment blocks from the fifties and warehouses and mega-stores that you can peel away until you reach the gleaming core with its casino and old town hall. Madrigal, who had lunched on pasta without sauce, just olive oil, walked past the apartment blocks wearing his green and white tracksuit. There were more people in the streets than usual. Some of them waved and held their thumbs in the air. They recognised the tracksuit, not him.

  When he reached the roadblock in front of the sports ground, some security men stopped him.

  ‘What do you want?’ one of them asked.

  ‘I’m the striker,’ said Madrigal. ‘I’m playing tonight.’

  His tracksuit persuaded the security man to let him through. Otherwise only people with tickets were being granted entry.

  Madrigal’s first instinct was to look not for his friend from Valencia, but for them. They weren’t there yet.

  In just two hours the referee would blow the whistle and the match would start.

  Robert was on the team bus on the way from Elche to Novelda, a police car with a blue light keeping the road clear for them. Roberto Bonano was next to him. At home Bonano wrote bedtime stories for his two children, he read Borges and Cortázar, his wife worked as a psychologist; Robert felt instinctively close to him. ‘But throughout the whole season we never talked about anything personal, even though we often shared a hotel room before the game,’ says Bonano, looking for an explanation he can’t quite find. ‘When you compete as a goalkeeper at a club like Barça, there’s always something between you and the other goalkeepers.’ Bonano and Robert didn’t say anything on the team bus. Some of the players were listening to music on headphones. Robert didn’t have a CD player. If you wanted music, you could listen to the radio. But it was quiet on the bus now; they must concentrate, the coach said.

  On the country road they passed through villages with names like Tres Hermanas – Three Sisters. The mountains behind them were bare and yellow. It was as if they were entering the realm of Don Quixote.

  The bus was air-conditioned, and he was wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt with the Barça emblem over his heart, but Robert felt hot.

  He could only lose. Whatever he tried to think about to distract himself, he always ended up with that thought. If everything went as planned, Barça would win 3–0 or 4–0 and no one would mention the goalkeeper. If it went wrong, he would get the blame.

  It was a ridiculous way of looking at things, Jörg had told him on the phone. In reality, the game was an opportunity for him to put in a confident performance. Of course no one would say afterwards Enke has to go in goal, just because he had made a decent impression in a cup game against a Third Division team, but he would put himself in the frame with the coaches. Victor Valdés, who had stayed at home this time, would go on to play shakily in the league over the next few weeks, Jörg was sure of that – he wasn’t quite ready yet. Robert’s day would come. Novelda was the first step.

  But however often Robert told himself the same things, he couldn’t actually see it that way.

  He could only lose.

  ‘Since being surprised on the first day of the season by the news that Valdés was number one, he was in a negative mood,’ says Jörg. ‘He convinced himself that everything was going against him.’

  Minor questions turned into self-doubt, and now, under the pressure of an approaching game, they turned into a fear that had nothing to do with the normal nerves of a goalkeeper. This fear was darker.

  If he failed here, not only would he have lost his chance, it would all be over.

  Frans Hoek wanted to see Victor in goal anyway. He’d coached him in Barça’s youth teams. Hoek wanted to be able to tell everybody, I made this goalkeeper. All goalkeeping coaches dream of discovering their keeper.

  God, this damned dry air!

  The team bus slowed down. Robert saw a crowd of people in the road, waving and shouting. They must be at the sports ground. The people behind the barriers beamed at him when he got off the bus. His lips were a thin line in his face.

  The radio was on in the FC Novelda changing-room, the door open. People stuck their heads in to wish them good luck. Madrigal, who had tried to get some sleep at midday but had just lain awake, heard the noise from the terraces through the walls. ‘It sounded as if there was a demonstration going on over our heads.’

  There was already a hint of grey in his hair, but he was twenty-six, in the best years of his football career. He had established himself in the Segunda Division B. The game gave him enough to live on, 2,000 euros a month, though he still calculated in pesetas – four million a year. He shared a flat on the Avenida de Elche in Novelda with two other players. What he liked to do was study. He had trained to be a teacher part-time. But they were professionals in Novelda – ‘we trained like every Primera División player does’ – and they were only bottom of the table because of Barça, he thought: with the cup game on their minds they had lost 3–0 to Burgos on Sunday. ‘For professionals like us you only get a game like the one against Barça once in a lifetime.’

  They had already changed into their kit. The changing-room smelled of massage oil. They were eager to get out there and warm up, but first they had to sit through the tactics talk. Their trainer, Antoni Teixido, wrote on the whiteboard who had to cover who for Barça’s corners and told them that this game was a reward for their efforts the previous season, the finest day of their year: they should enjoy it, play as they always did and not injure anybody. The speech lasted only two minutes. The coach didn’t outline a single attacking move nor a particular defensive concept, he did not mention a single notion like: Rochemback always goes past on the right, so force him on to his left foot. Teixido knew that his players were already keyed up. More words would only have stressed them.

  Robert hurried across the basketball pitch to the away changing-room. Above the main entrance to the sports ground hung the Spanish flag, old and tattered. Children carried the gleaming metal cases containing Barça’s equipment back and forth between the gymnasium and the changing-room. ‘I kept thinking about the Barça players sitting in that changing-room,’ says Aurelio Borghino, Novelda’s substitute goalkeeper. ‘It’s more a shaft than a room. It’s just got one tiny window, really cramped, low ceiling, the sweat of many years in the walls.’

  Robert tried to listen as the coach dispensed instructions on tactics. Van Gaal’s voice was droning about pressing in attack, winning the ball back straight away, being aggressive, passing the ball behind the defence only in the last third of the pitch. A good coach prepared every game with as much care and detail as a Champions League final, thought Louis van Gaal, and he regarded himself as one of the best.

  Today, Robert absolutely had to stand eight or nine yards in front of his goal when Novelda got the ball back in midfield. Novelda would immediately go for a long pass, and then he would have to come out like van der Sar, collect the through-ball, even if it was outside the box … damn it, now he was thinking exactly the same way as the coaches talked. Bloody van der Sar.

  The spectators clapped as if a goal had been scored. FC Novelda had come out of the changing-room tunnel to do their warm-up. ‘Then we saw them for the first time,’ says Madrigal, who had spent hours talking shop with his two flatmates, working out which team Barça were likely to put out. ‘It was impossible to concentrate on the warm-up,’ says Madrigal. Out of the corners of his eyes he kept seeing the flashes from pocket cameras on the terraces. They did a few sprints and stretched their muscles on the advertising boards. In that position they could take a good look at the Barça players.

  Frans Hoek was helping Robert warm up. ‘Cup games like this are hardest
for a substitute goalkeeper,’ says Hoek. ‘You haven’t got the rhythm, and you’re supposed to prove yourself. You’re under extreme pressure.’

  ‘You come from a foreign country and you’re supposed to play on a crappy pitch in an unpractised team full of substitutes,’ observes Victor Valdés. ‘Boy, you have doubts, you have a bad feeling!’

  ‘You notice when a goalkeeper’s under too much pressure,’ says Bonano.

  The teams took up position back in the tunnel. The corridor was so narrow that there was barely room for the two sides. Toni Madrigal and Robert Enke could have touched each other. But they never exchanged a word. They stood isolated in their own worlds, far removed from each other in their thoughts.

  ‘I saw the referee, who normally blew his whistle in the Primera División,’ says Madrigal. ‘I saw the Barça eleven – Riquelme, Frank de Boer, Xavi. I had the feeling: now you’re playing in the top flight.’

  There are pictures of Robert on the pitch, posing for the photographers with his team before kick-off. It was just before eight o’clock in the evening but still bright daylight. He’s on the far left of the second row, Thiago Motta beside him thrusting out his chest and putting his arm firmly around him. Robert’s left shoulder and arm dangle limply, his mouth is open and his eyes wide. His fear is frozen in those photographs for ever.

  It was 11 September 2002. You can’t forget the date – one year after the New York terror attacks, and a Catalan national holiday.

  On the narrow terraces, in many places only two rows of green seats, sat Madrigal’s parents, brother and uncle.