A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  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.

  They showed the agent the nursery. Lara’s name was still on the wooden door in magnetic letters. Teresa and Robert wanted to put their adopted child’s name up next to it. They wanted their second child to learn in the most natural way possible that it had a dead sister.

  In October they received confirmation that their application for adoption had been accepted. Now they had to wait, and they didn’t know whether it would be four weeks or fourteen months until they got their child.

  Time flew, it seemed to Robert. His newfound status as Germany’s goalkeeper had given his life a new pace. Everything seemed faster, more sudden, particularly his excitement. He travelled to training with the national team in Düsseldorf as the climax of the World Cup qualifiers was imminent – the game against European Championship semi-finalists Russia. Since Lehmann’s departure he had been in goal for all the internationals, and his performance had been faultless. But four days before the game against Russia, Germany’s biggest selling tabloid Bild carried a headline about him and Joachim Löw that sounded like a threat: ‘Enke: Jogi’s number one – until the first mistake’.

  He tried not to take it personally. He knew that what looked like a campaign against him was basically only a personal prejudice: the Bild correspondent covering the national team usually reported on René Adler and Bayer Leverkusen, and he liked René so much that he fought for the lad in every headline. But his fury didn’t subside. Why did the Bild man have to attack him just because he was René’s competitor? Hannover had lost 2–0 in Leverkusen once – an everyday result in the Bundesliga. In Bild the man had as his headline ‘Enke in the shooting-range’.

  It’s not important, Robert tried to reassure himself.

  In other media, too, he and René were turned into great rivals in the days leading up to the Russia game. Lehmann v. Kahn was yesterday; now the battle of the goalkeepers was between Enke and Adler. In fact they were becoming increasingly close. There was an awkward awareness that they were fighting for the same place but they didn’t talk about it. They were cordial rivals. ‘Robert and René tended to need harmony,’ says Köpke. ‘They were different from Olli Kahn and Jens Lehmann. They didn’t need that kick to wind each other up, to turn each other into enemies. Those days are over anyway. These days life in a football team is more about companionship.’

  ‘I always had the feeling that there was no competition between us,’ says René. ‘And I think that did us both good. It helps if you don’t have that pressure in training – if he saves that ball, I have to save a better one.’

  In Düsseldorf, three days before the big match, the coach organised a four-a-side practice game on a small pitch. At one point Philipp Lahm shot from a short distance away. Robert threw his fists up and deflected the ball. In the other goal René was concentrating on the game because the next shot could come straight at him. The game was going back and forth on the little playing-field, the players learning to make the right decisions in the tightest space in the shortest time.

  At the next drinks break Robert went up to Andy Köpke and said, ‘I’ve pulled my wrist back punching, something’s gone. I might have dislocated my hand.’

  ‘Put some ice on it and go and see the doctor straight away.’

  René was standing a few feet away, his thoughts still on the practice game, which resumed within minutes. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Robert wasn’t coming back on to the pitch, and that Tim Wiese was coming on in his place.

  The doctor carefully moved Robert’s left hand. Then he said, ‘We’ve got to go to hospital.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Leila

  HIS SCAPHOID BONE was fractured. While the national team were having one last practice at corners in Düsseldorf, Robert was in the hand surgery department in a Hamburg hospital.

  Dr Klaus-Dieter Rudolf had put a screw in Robert’s wrist – a ‘Herbert screw’ – to stabilise the carpal bones at the spot where the hand was broken. The operation had been successful, Rudolf told him, which suggested that the break was going to heal smoothly; the method had been applied successfully many times before. But the doctor wanted to be honest with him. Robert Enke was a goalkeeper. His wrist was subject to extreme movements and strains. The healing process was a complicated one and there was a risk that he would never be able to stretch his hand out fully again.

  Teresa collected him. His hand was in a red plaster-cast with Velcro fastenings as he was supposed to take it off for a few hours every day and keep the wrist moving. In three months he could expect to be back in goal. But it wasn’t so easy for Robert to look forward to that day. Why did things like that always have to happen to him? ‘It was a normal shot, the kind of shot I’d saved a thousand times.’

  He called on his neighbour Uli. Did he want his two tickets for the game against Russia in Dortmund? Uli told him his brother-in-law Jürgen had once fractured his scaphoid bone, in both hands. He had fallen while doing his job as a roofer.

  ‘Can you stretch your hands all the way out?’ Robert asked Jürgen when he met him.

  ‘I can hardly stretch them out at all,’ said Jürgen, and showed him.

  Robert stared at him.

  He watched the match that was supposed to have been his on television. Teresa sat down with him. Germany played energetically, they were quick on their feet, and after half an hour they were leading 2–0 with goals from Lukas Podolski and Michael Ballack. Shortly before half-time Philipp Lahm on the left wing lost the ball to Aleksandr Anyukov who immediately cut into the German penalty area. René Adler came out a long way towards him, following the theory of the ‘radicals’, dashing out of his six-yard box to keep Anyukov’s angle of fire as small as possible. René’s feeling was that the Russian, so close to the byline, would pass back into space. So when Anyukov made a move to put in a low cross the keeper sidestepped to the right. But René was out of luck. Anyukov knocked the ball straight through his legs. In the six-yard box Andrei Arshavin connected with it and made it 2–1. It hadn’t been a goalkeeping error; it was a situation in which there was hardly anything a goalkeeper could have done. Robert alone was thinking, ‘There was a different way of resolving that.’ He was sure that with his technique of bending his right knee inwards he could have prevented that pass between the legs.

  There was still half a match left, and that goal changed the game’s dynamic. The Russians suddenly charged. René tipped a lovely header over the bar, then successfully threw himself at Sergei Semak at the last moment, and, surrounded by seven players, took a fabulous catch off a cross Robert wouldn’t have gone for. Robert sat in his living-room and heard the television commentator shouting: ‘Great stuff from Adler! … I repeat my compliment: that is truly great stuff from Adler … and Adler again!’ It was twenty past ten in the evening, with ten minutes still to go in Dortmund. The excitement was palpable. Could the Germans hold on for victory?

  Robert got up and said to Teresa, ‘I’m going to bed.’

  He didn’t want to read the papers over the next few days. But his colleagues talked to him during rehab training at the Hannover stadium. ‘That’s just impossible. Have you seen what the papers are saying, even the supposedly serious ones? “The age of Adler has begun, the battle of the goalies is decided.” Are they all bonkers?’ His colleagues meant well. They were trying to say these were absurd celebrations, he shouldn’t let himself be put off by all this media hubbub. But by referring to the headlines they had really disconcerted him.

  Two days after the game against Russia he called me. He d
idn’t give me time to ask about his scaphoid bone. He wanted to get to the point: ‘You’re a journalist.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you think about what your colleagues did with René’s game?’

  ‘You mustn’t forget that it was René’s first international. Considering this he did really well. And unfortunately sportswriters always tend to predict a brilliant career for young footballers when they’ve had a good game. You were just as hyped as a nineteen-year-old in Gladbach. Try to ignore it.’

  ‘Sure. I don’t even care. I just wanted to know how you saw things.’

  In November 2008 Robert agreed to speak to the magazine 11 Freunde. It turned out to be his most open interview, although the readers couldn’t have known it. He said of his time after Istanbul, ‘It wasn’t the kind of crisis that any goalkeeper experiences when he misses the ball five or six times in the Bundesliga. There was something existential about it.’ But one passage was never published. Robert had it deleted because it struck him as too honest and bitter in retrospect. He was asked what he thought about the fact that the media had declared René Adler to be number one after a single international, and he replied, ‘This hype about René didn’t just start over the past few weeks. The subject has been being stirred up for ages. I sometimes wonder what’s going on. It was a completely normal game that he played against Russia, nothing sensational. It’s not easy for me to deal with it … In the public perception I’ve been left standing by the Adler and Neuer generation, and I’ve got to accept that that’s the case.’

  One man in Germany shared Robert’s opinion that he unfairly came off worst in comparison with René Adler: René himself. ‘I could understand Robbi being disturbed by the reports after the Russia game. It was a good match of mine, but it wasn’t a stunner. What the media made of it was pretty extreme. I found it embarrassing.’