A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  Teresa was sitting at home alone in front of the television in Sant Cugat. She heard not the commentator’s voice but Robbi’s, the mounting despair of the previous few days: ‘I can only lose.’

  When the game began, she wished it would soon be over.

  Barça immediately took possession of the ball and wouldn’t give it back. They passed and passed, playing in slightly too relaxed a manner. ‘They were faster and better, and we were running behind them,’ says Madrigal. ‘When we got close to the ball, in their minds they were already a pass further on.’ Román Riquelme, the most curious footballer in the world – his movements are the embodiment of slowness, but hardly anyone can get the ball away from him because he thinks faster than most – played with the upright back and raised head of a midfield majesty, right at the centre of things.

  Four months earlier Real Madrid had won the Champions League with Zidane, Figo and Raúl, and Barça could no longer bear the unfavourable comparisons with the Galácticos. The club felt impelled to win something again, and the Argentinian Riquelme, newly arrived from Buenos Aires, was to be their saviour.

  After seven minutes he played a pass, as van Gaal had demanded, in the attacking third, steep and into empty space, and Geovanni converted it. Novelda’s fans applauded the goal. From what they’d seen so far they were convinced the only joy of the evening would lie in admiring Barça. Madrigal thought, ‘They’re going to put ten past us.’

  Teresa couldn’t see Robert; everything was happening in the other half of the field. Van Gaal had only put up a three-man defence – a risk hardly a coach took these days, but against a Segunda B side it was plainly fine. So Barça had an extra man in attack – as if they needed one.

  Madrigal lurked, he circled. He stood with his back to Barça’s goal but kept his shoulder pointing in that direction so that he could strike straight away when it came to it. Whenever Novelda emerged from midfield and danger seemed a possibility, however remote, Robert immediately retreated closer to the goal-line.

  Madrigal could feel the goalkeeper behind him, but he never heard him. ‘They didn’t talk to each other,’ Madrigal noticed, which he saw as a strength: Barça’s defence knew automatically what their goalkeeper was doing, and vice versa.

  Madrigal couldn’t entirely concentrate on the game. The atmosphere was so unfamiliar. He looked beyond the goal. Where a few young people normally hung about on the balustrade, extra terraces had been built for the evening; the builders’ cranes loomed high over the sports-ground walls. Some fans were sitting in the cabin of the crane, and at the windows of the school on the other side. Some five thousand spectators filled the ground. After half an hour Barça’s players were nudging one another on the substitutes bench. Bonano pointed to the sky. Three para-gliders circled there, also trying to catch something of the game.

  The Novelda pitch is one of the smallest and narrowest in Spanish professional football, ninety-seven metres long and sixty-three metres wide – eight metres shorter and five metres narrower than Camp Nou. That was an advantage for Robert given his initial difficulties in finding the correct position for a Barça goalkeeper, the sportswriters had written before the game; his defenders would be closer to him. But what do sportswriters know? The ball just came flying much faster out of Novelda’s midfield and into his penalty box. All the dimensions were wrong. How was he supposed to come here … and now they were turning the floodlights on. They weren’t lights, they were just a glow. How was he supposed to see the ball clearly now? How was he supposed to play well under these conditions?

  Everyone was glad when the referee blew the whistle for half-time: Barça, because they were easily dominating the game; Novelda, because the score was only 1–0; Robert Enke, because he had survived the first half without being troubled by the opposing team.

  Teresa went into the garden to smoke a cigarette. Her temples throbbed.

  Novelda’s goalkeeper came up to Robert in the tunnel and asked if they could swap shirts after the game.

  The second half began as a repetition of the first; few were bothered that Barça’s passes remained sterile. People thought: they’re controlling the game. In the press seats, Cayetano Ros of El País wrote on his laptop, ‘Barça thought their opponents had given up: they had made them run after the ball for an hour.’

  That hour was almost complete when Novelda were awarded a free kick on the left wing. Miguel Angel Mullor, one of Madrigal’s two flatmates, clipped the ball into the box. Robert had to come out of his goal and catch it, but suddenly the ball’s trajectory flattened out, right in that damned glowing light. He hesitated. Level with the far post an opposing player was completely unmarked. Robert saw his white shorts out of the corner of his eye – peripheral vision, unconscious perception, one of his great strengths. He had to shout Hostia, allí, el delantero!, anything to draw his defenders’ attention to the lone man. But he couldn’t.

  Silent, paralysed, he stayed on the goal-line.

  The ball flew on as if it were seeking Madrigal’s right foot. He slipped his marker, the Dutch international Michael Reiziger, and took the risk to hit it first time diagonally into Robert’s far corner to make it 1–1.

  ‘We’ll win this one, we’ll win this one!’ yelled the Novelda players as they fell on Madrigal.

  ‘Us, win against Barça?’ he wondered.

  Robert stood frozen in front of his goal.

  A goal does what people would love to be able to do: it changes everything in an instant.

  For fifty-eight minutes Madrigal had been chafing away at Barça’s defenders. One of them, Reiziger, ‘ran for every ball at fantastic speed’. Frank de Boer, the Dutch World Cup semi-finalist and Barça’s captain that evening, had ‘an excellent technique’. The third, Fernando Navarro, a European champion with Spain six years later, hurried over to help his colleagues at the smallest sign of distress. All of a sudden, however, ‘Reiziger wasn’t playing tightly, Navarro was nervous, and Frank de Boer was starting to criticise everyone and everything. He was no longer part of the game.’ Madrigal forgot the significance of the game, the noise, the opposing team. All that existed now was the ball, the pitch, the goal.

  When Barça attacked, when the ball was far away from him, things got bad for Robert. He had too much time to think about the equaliser. It had been Reiziger’s mistake, but why hadn’t he come out? He should have come out and gathered the cross. A shot flew at him and he wasn’t prepared for it. He tore himself out of his despair, instinctively threw up his hands and slapped the ball away towards the edge of the box. No harm was done. But everyone could see the state he was in.

  Again Novelda slung a free kick high into his penalty area, and again it was deflected but not far enough away this time. Friend and opponent fumbled for the ball twenty yards in front of the goal. When Rochemback finally seemed to have the ball under control, Barça’s defence began to move out. Madrigal sensed rather than saw that his flatmate could still get the ball back, which he did. Mullor immediately lobbed it into the box for Madrigal, who was already running towards Barça’s goal. He had only a split second’s advantage; de Boer was after him, but he wasn’t quick like Reiziger. As the cross came in, Robert was stranded in the no-man’s-land of a goalkeeper; he knew there was no point running further forward, whatever happened Madrigal would get to the ball before he did. Madrigal buried the ball in the net from twelve yards out, taking the score to 2–1.

  ‘I didn’t feel: now you’re famous, or: now you’ve done it,’ says Madrigal. ‘I was just happy.’

  Three minutes later Riquelme equalised with a penalty. The little Argentinian had fought with bravura.

  A murmur arose on the terraces. A football crowd often can sense when a game reaches its turning-point, and with Barça wiping out Novelda’s lead so quickly, a feeling next to certainty was in the air: The underdog had put up a great fight, but now the big favourite, the twenty-four-times Copa del Rey winners from Barcelona, would dash the hopes of the upstarts with one or two ic
e-cold masterstrokes. Of course he too was afraid that it would end like this, says Madrigal. But something surprised him. ‘Barça weren’t reassured by the equaliser. They were talking to each other now, but in very negative terms. De Boer was beside himself, shouting at everyone, Robert included. It sounds wrong for me to say as a Segunda B player, but the truth is that their defence was making enormous mistakes. Reiziger: he didn’t grab me by the arm before my first goal, he never used his body as an obstacle.’ For a moment Madrigal sounds utterly baffled. ‘I don’t know whether I’m just used to more violence in Segunda B, but their low level of resistance was very odd.’

  The game had long since come apart at the seams. Now the hearts, not the brains, of both teams were driving them back and forth.

  The pace of the match left Robert feeling slow. A keeper who blames himself for a goal experiences the remaining minutes of play with an unbearable mixture of indifference and panic. The evening is already over as far as he’s concerned: it’s unsalvageable, whatever the outcome. At the same time he wants to make everything better again, but immediately he is gripped again by the fear that he’ll make everything worse the next time he tries to do anything.

  On the left side of midfield, a ricocheting pass fell at the feet of Novelda’s captain Cudi, and Madrigal knew exactly what was going to happen. Cudi always crossed to the back post. Madrigal sprinted diagonally towards it, trying to build up enough impetus for a decisive header. Robert saw de Boer going with Madrigal.

  There was nothing elegant about Cudi’s cross. The ball flew towards Robert’s six-yard line. He had to come out. It was an easy take for a goalkeeper like him.

  You can spot a frightened goalkeeper by his response to a cross. He always hesitates a moment too long. Robert didn’t even take a step forward. De Boer himself just stopped, too. He will never know why; it happened too quickly; perhaps he too was scared of making a mistake, perhaps he wanted to make room for his keeper. He was used to the goalie coming out: he had played for years with Edwin van der Sar at Ajax Amsterdam.

  Madrigal suddenly felt calm. He took his time. He didn’t head the ball straight at the goal, but placed his header so that it would bounce in front of Robert and spin unpredictably. Madrigal could already see the ball in the back of the net as he met it.

  Novelda’s subs bench thundered because the fans were thumping the roof. Aurelio Borghino, the substitute keeper, disappeared in a joyous huddle with the other subs. Then, while he still had his arms in the air, something suddenly caught his eye. ‘De Boer was standing in the penalty box. He was railing at Enke. I’ve never seen anything like it. A professional doesn’t do something like that, humiliating a team-mate on the pitch. Robert Enke stood there, his face pale, eyes lowered, and didn’t say a word.’

  There were twelve minutes left, but the game had already found its concluding image.

  For Robert Enke it was a long journey to get off that playing-field. Hundreds of fans had stormed on to the pitch, laughing and shouting: We’ve beaten Barça! They circled Robert; they asked him for autographs, for his gloves; they beamed at him; they shouted: We’ve beaten Barça 3–2! ‘People often have bad manners,’ says Madrigal. ‘They didn’t understand what this defeat meant for Barça’s players, like Robert.’ The loudspeakers crackled; the stadium announcer had put on the signature tune of the Champions League immediately after the final whistle. Robert fought his way through the crowd without being wholly aware of them. He gave Novelda’s goalkeeper his jersey, without feeling the movements as he pulled it from his body.

  He phoned Teresa the moment he reached the changing-room, as he always did. After they had put down the phone, neither he nor she could remember what they had said.

  He usually loved those moments after a game in the changing-room, when the tension slowly faded away. He had his ritual. He always took his socks off last; often he sat there for a while before showering, his socks up to his knees, but otherwise naked. In Novelda, no other player got showered and out of the changing-room as fast as he did.

  He answered only two questions from reporters.

  Robert, what happened here?

  ‘I can’t find an explanation for what has happened. It’s hard to go back in goal and then concede three goals to a Third Division team.’

  Do the defenders bear most of the blame for the defeat?

  ‘This isn’t the moment to look for people to blame. Each individual should analyse his own performance.’

  He pulled himself away, went to sit on the bus, waited for it to drive off, for the darkness to swallow him up.

  Toni Madrigal had wanted to swap his shirt with Riquelme, as they had agreed at half-time, but Riquelme ignored him. At the door to the changing-room Madrigal’s mother fought the stewards with words and hands to let her in. They relented when someone called to Madrigal and he confirmed that he knew this woman.

  A few metres away a boy was asking his father to stop praising the hat-trick scorer to the reporters. ‘Otherwise the big teams will take him away from us, Papa,’ the boy said to Juan Francisco Sánchez, Novelda’s president.

  ‘In three or four weeks no one will remember me,’ Madrigal told the sportswriters. He wasn’t sure whether or not to believe his own words.

  The floodlights were still on; the walls of the ground, with their crumbling whitewash, gleamed. Some of the sportswriters sat on the ground in the gym, which had been converted into a press conference room.

  ‘The old vices were visible again, above all the inexplicable hole in the defence opened up by de Boer and Reiziger in which they buried themselves and Enke in his debut game,’ wrote El Mundo Deportivo.

  ‘Enke signed his own sentence,’ the Sport decided.

  Frank de Boer, who had been asked to speak for the team as Barça’s captain that evening, appeared on the basketball court beside the ground, where the reporters were waiting. He was a veteran of over four hundred top-flight club games and a hundred for his country. ‘That first goal didn’t make Michael Reiziger look good,’ he said, ‘but Enke should have come out to take the cross, because he was almost level with the ball.’ With regard to Novelda’s winning goal, when de Boer had stood beside Madrigal and done nothing, de Boer simply said, ‘Enke has to catch the ball.’

  It is an unwritten law in professional football: never criticise your team-mates in public.

  At Alicante airport the footballers of FC Barcelona waited for their charter plane to take off, each man an island, with no desire to speak and even less of a craving to hear anything. Excited sports journalists were spreading the news. De Boer’s behaviour had been incredible, unprecedented; he was the worst of all and he attacks his team-mates, and he does it as the captain? No one dared tell Robert.

  It was after one in the morning when he opened his front door in Sant Cugat. He went to the bathroom to wash his gloves with shampoo and lay them carefully out to dry, as he always did.

  In Novelda, on the Avenida de Elche, Toni Madrigal sat at the kitchen table with his two flatmates Miguel Angel Mullor, who had set up two goals for him, and Toni Martínez, who couldn’t play because of a knee injury – at this of all times. ‘It was late when we got back from the stadium, after eleven, and there aren’t many restaurants open in Novelda at that time of night,’ says Madrigal, so they ordered a pizza at home to celebrate.

  The next morning Robert walked into the changing-room in Camp Nou on time for training, with a feeling that he would rather be somewhere else. As always, breakfast had been prepared for the players. If some of them voluntarily sat down for a cappuccino and some fruit and croissants every morning, they were more likely to become a team. Robert ignored the food, and sat down next to the Swede Patrick Andersson, a fellow player of his at Borussia Mönchengladbach. Sitting next to Patrik, talking in German, felt like being home again.

  ‘Did you see what de Boer said about you?’ hissed Andersson, who competed with de Boer for a place in defence. ‘You can’t put up with that, you’ve got to fire back!’ />
  Robert, too impotent to feel furious, went to see de Boer out of a sense of duty towards Andersson. He quietly asked him what was going on.

  He’d been misquoted – you know journalists, replied de Boer.

  Robert said nothing more. He thought it wasn’t seemly to row with your team-mates. And above all he didn’t want anything more to do with de Boer. He just wanted to be on his own.

  Luis Enrique, the real captain of Barcelona who, like some of the other senior players, had been rested in Novelda, gave de Boer a good talking-to. Coach van Gaal roared at his fellow Dutchman: a professional didn’t behave like that, certainly not one with his experience.

  No one paid any attention to Robert. Why would they have? He was a professional, he should be able to get on with things. Van Gaal didn’t talk to him; ‘he didn’t talk to me all year’. No one defended him against the headlines: ‘Where was Enke?’ ‘The German goalkeeper has demonstrated that he’s too green for Barça’.

  ‘He was thrown to the lions,’ says Victor Valdés.

  Robert and Frank de Boer had to go to the press conference. Robert said, ‘I’ve never criticised another player in my life and I’m not going to do it now. The whole team lost.’ De Boer said he hadn’t intended to criticise anyone, he’d just wanted to explain the goals. ‘Enke could have done more to prevent these goals, and me too. I failed over the third goal, but I think I played well.’

  ‘There was one thing I wanted to ask,’ Victor Valdés says to me eight years later. ‘Did de Boer ever apologise to Robert?’

  Never.

  A curious noise comes out of Victor’s mouth. Is it a gurgle, is it laughter? Is it surprise, is it contempt?

  Robert didn’t read the newspapers on 12 September. But he did find out what was in them. A professional footballer senses the vibrations of public opinion. Some acquaintance on the phone, some fan at the training-ground, always says, did you see what they wrote about you? In a world where people’s destinies are routinely reduced to knee-jerk headlines, all of a sudden he was the goalkeeper who had failed.