A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  They talked for over half an hour. Robert analysed the goals scored against Ulreich. What was important, Robert told him, was decisions. You punched the first ball – fine. For the second goal Ulreich actually executed a perfectly good dive; the rest was bad luck. He mustn’t despair, even if the coach now wanted to take him off the team. That public criticism from Armin Veh was really the worst. He’d had exactly the same thing at Barcelona – one stupid match and he was out of the team. He’d gone into a very deep trough but – this was the important thing he wanted to say to Ulreich – he’d come out of it again. Ulreich would do the same. He had a huge talent.

  ‘When I hung up,’ says Sven Ulreich, ‘I had goosebumps.’

  He turned to his mother. ‘That was Robert Enke.’ His mother waited for an explanation, but Sven didn’t really have one.

  ‘I don’t think there’d ever been anything like that in professional football before, a national goalkeeper spontaneously ringing an unknown nineteen-year-old to help him.’

  In the afternoons in Empede his route still led him, as before, to the cemetery – up the Lange Berg with Teresa and the dogs, through the fields to Lara. When they were all walking back from the grave along the country road to the village he realised that he could now imagine standing by the graveside with a child and saying to that child quite naturally: that was your sister.

  A second child wouldn’t be an attempt to replace Lara. It would just be their second child. He saw no reason now why they couldn’t love a second child just as much as all parents love their children.

  What Teresa could no longer contemplate was pregnancy. She didn’t think she’d be able to bear the risk, the fear of having another sick child.

  They knew a couple in Hanover who had adopted. They’d found out about the procedure – examination by the youth welfare office, waiting periods. Why didn’t they start looking into it after the summer?

  The summer lay like a big block of stone in front of their future. For the time being, the question of whether Robert would be selected for the European Championship in June was putting everything on hold. Jörg and Teresa worked themselves up into a rage when the sportswriters, with open affection, called for the inclusion of René Adler, because he was a nice high-flyer who made sensational saves. It did Robert good when Jörg and Teresa got worked up on his behalf. When they lost their temper he felt forced to keep his. Then he had to calm them down: don’t panic, the national goalkeeping coach values me, and anyway three keepers go to the European Championship. After his performances over the last years he felt quite honestly that he was second-best. When he argued as calmly as that in front of them, he usually ended up convincing himself.

  A year and a half after Lara’s death it was the normal anxieties, the usual doubts of a goalkeeper, that were bothering him again. ‘It’s all coming back,’ said Teresa. ‘Fury at letting in a goal, irritation because they don’t have the jeans you fancy in a size thirty-four, all the everyday nuisances. It just doesn’t go so deep.’

  They had gone to Hamburg for two days again, to be a normal, happy couple. Teresa wanted to buy some jeans in a boutique. While she was slipping into a pair in the changing-room, he started flicking through Kicker.

  ‘How do you like these?’

  ‘Yes, fine.’ He’d barely looked up.

  Teresa tried on five different pairs. Each time she came out of the changing-room so that he could pass judgement. Every time he said, with one eye still on the magazine, ‘Yes, fine.’

  She had had enough. She went back into the changing-room and put on another pair.

  ‘Or shall I take these?’

  ‘Yes, they’re fine too.’

  ‘Robbi, can you not even look?’

  She had put her own jeans back on.

  SEVENTEEN

  In the Land of Goalkeepers

  JOACHIM LÖW CAME TO Königsallee to see nothing and not to be seen. In a place where other people admire the latest fashions and put themselves on display, the national coach had come in search of seclusion. He booked into a hotel suite on the Düsseldorf boulevard for three days from 5 May 2008. He wanted to confer undisturbed with his coaching staff on the squad for the European Championship. The position of goalkeeper wasn’t the most urgent topic, but it was the most sensitive. There were three places. And four candidates.

  Jens Lehmann had to be number one – Löw had decided that months ago when he left Lehmann in goal even though he remained Arsenal’s substitute goalkeeper. The memory of what Lehmann achieved during the 2006 World Cup carried more weight than thoughts of what the other three might be able to achieve.

  That left Timo Hildebrand, Robert Enke and René Adler. Hildebrand and Robert had been permanent members of the squad, as substitute goalkeepers, for a year. Throughout that period Adler had been the most outstanding goalkeeper in the Bundesliga.

  It was easier to make the decision if they chose the third goalkeeper first. Germany had never fielded their third-choice goalkeeper in a World Cup or European Championship match, so it had become a tradition to take as third keeper a young man who could gain valuable experience of tournament life. The twenty-three-year-old Adler, who had appeared like a revelation in the Bundesliga, was the ideal candidate for the post.

  ‘That left us with the question, whether we hurt Timo or Robert,’ recalls Germany’s goalkeeping coach Andreas Köpke.

  Over five years, Hildebrand had been built up as the logical successor to Kahn and Lehmann, he had been number three at the 2004 European Championship and the 2006 World Cup; the lad with a future. Robert had slipped into the national squad at the age of twenty-nine and had only played a single international. Hildebrand had just had a hard year, however. In his first season with FC Valencia he had clashed with his fellow keeper Santiago Cañizares, who wasn’t going to give up his place in goal without a fight. He treated Hildebrand with cold contempt, exchanging not a single word with him. It was nothing personal, it was just a weapon. Two changes of coach in one season didn’t improve the working atmosphere at Valencia. ‘There’s always something going on here,’ said Hildebrand.

  The tension was apparent in his game. If you analysed the season in Spain unsentimentally, one of Löw’s colleagues at the hotel on the Königsallee observed, ‘Timo made mistakes in almost every match.’ Sometimes Hildebrand wasn’t sure-handed enough to gather a shot first time, sometimes he collided with his defenders when trying to catch a cross. These mistakes rarely had serious consequences, but Timo’s playing didn’t exactly exude a sense of security. For Germany, too, Hildebrand had wobbled under genuine pressure in his one game, a qualifier against Cyprus. Robert, on the other hand, had been playing with great consistency for four years in Hanover. ‘With someone like that the guys know for sure: he’s there. And that gives the defence the security they need,’ said Köpke.

  But Hildebrand had had great moments in Valencia too. Once the fans were treated to a mano de milagro – a ‘miraculous hand’ – when he parried a header from Levantes Álvaro de Aquino while his momentum was taking him in the opposite direction. For five years they had been inviting Hildebrand on to the national team because they saw him as a possible number one. Shouldn’t they overlook a bumpy season in extremely difficult conditions?

  Or was the question precisely this: which goalkeeper could best cope under extreme conditions? Wasn’t that the crucial point in the search for a substitute goalkeeper? ‘What if Jens Lehmann gets injured in the European Championship semi-final?’ Köpke asked, and answered himself: ‘Then you can put Robert in goal for the final without any problem. His nerves are so strong that he’d go calmly even into a game like that. After his daughter’s death he knows that there are more important things in the world.’ The other people in the room – Löw, his assistant coach Hansi Flick and chief scout Urs Siegenthaler – saw things exactly the same way. Löw would have to make the final decision on his own.

  On 16 May, three weeks before the European Championship, the time came to reveal th
e squad. Seven television channels were going to broadcast it live. Köpke called the four goalkeepers before the announcement so that the unlucky one wouldn’t learn the sad news from the media.

  At about nine o’clock in the morning Timo Hildebrand was already on the way to the suburb of Paterna for FC Valencia’s last training session that season. He had sprained his hip. He wanted to sit out Valencia’s final league match two days later against Atlético Madrid to spare the joint for the European Championship. He had spent five years waiting patiently behind Kahn and Lehmann: this was to be his last tournament as a substitute goalkeeper, and then Lehmann would step down. The way to the top would finally be free.

  Köpke’s call reached Hildebrand in his car. He listened to the coach for a good minute, then tried to say something in reply, but the words wouldn’t come together into sentences. Hildebrand simply hung up.

  It took him a quarter of an hour even to begin to regain his composure. He parked at the training-ground and phoned Köpke back again.

  ‘But why, Andy?’ he asked. ‘Why?’

  As the public learned about Löw’s squad on one of the seven television channels, Robert called a friend.

  ‘Jacques,’ he said, ‘where are you?’

  ‘Hey, Robert, fantastic! Fantastic! I just heard on the radio. I’m delighted for you – incredible! You’re going to the European Championship!’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘This calls for a party. You must be over the moon, Robert!’

  ‘I’ve known since yesterday evening. Listen, Jacques, I just wanted to know where you are. I’ll call round with your mail.’

  He took a detour on the way home from training to the other side of Hanover to take Jacques his letters and have a bit of a chat. Then he rang Timo Hildebrand.

  Their relationship had been reticently professional. He had watched Hildebrand more than he had talked to him, but he had noticed one thing: the switch to Valencia, which had rather put him off his sporting stride, had done Hildebrand good in other ways. ‘It seems to me that he’s become more sympathetic, more affable,’ said Robert. The fact that Hildebrand had experienced powerlessness alone in a foreign team in a foreign country had made him more sensitive to others, Robert thought. It seemed all the more important to him to show sympathy to Hildebrand now. However difficult the phone-call was.

  He actually didn’t know what to say to his competitor, whose place he had taken. ‘And I don’t know whether there’s such a thing as the right words in a situation like that,’ he said when we talked about it later. He simply rattled on. He was sorry. He could understand how Timo felt. In three months a new season would start and there was still a lot to win in football, even for Timo. The conversation was short. ‘But I had the feeling Timo was glad of my call.’

  The European Championship began as a nice boat trip. A yacht took the national team into the open sea near Majorca where they could dive and swim and believe for a while that they were actually in a rejuvenation training-camp, as the coaches had called the first part of preparation in Palma de Mallorca.

  In his year with the national team Robert had found himself part of a clique along with centre-backs Per Mertesacker and Christoph Metzelder. He didn’t find it as easy to get close to his natural friends, the other goalkeepers.

  ‘He doesn’t talk,’ he said with a shrug about Jens Lehmann.

  Lehmann cultivated the role of the goalkeeper as a lonesome cowboy who must grimly and recklessly go his own way. When he did open up, he tended to become didactic. One of his favourite topics at the time was that everything was better at his club, Arsenal, and in England generally, than anywhere else. Rather mysteriously, however, Lehmann failed to pick up on the two most important English virtues – politeness and irony – during his five years in London.

  Where the other goalkeeper was concerned, Robert had certain reservations. The fact that there would be a time after the European Championship, after Lehmann, could not be ignored; then René Adler and he would fight it out for the number one spot, according to the recent squad selection. But that didn’t seem to worry the lad too much. Robert noticed with surprise that Adler was trying to make contact with him. While Lehmann went ahead with his training programme in complete silence, Adler called out ‘Super, Robert!’ after a save, or wanted to know whether he should stand a bit further back to take a cross. After a few days he offered Robert the ultimate fraternisation ritual between goalkeepers: he asked if he could try on Robert’s gloves. ‘He had a really wide hand,’ says René. ‘I slipped about in his gloves.’

  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 Rüdiger 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.