How one can be the loneliest number

The tale of Robert Enke's tragic battle with depression shines a light on the anxieties and pressure that can be suffered by professional players, writes KEITH DUGGAN

ON SEPTEMBER 11th 2002, Barcelona FC visited the humble home pitch of third division side FC Novelda in the Copa del Rey. The town was famous for marble, not football. Louis van Gaal, the Barca coach, had decided to use the some of his reserves for what should have been a routine match, including their newly signed German goalkeeper Robert Enke.

The tie was the archetypal gods-and-minnows affair that has been the glory of all domestic cups since the beginning of association football.

"Above the main entrance to the sports ground hung the Spanish flag, old and tattered," writes Ronald Reng in A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke.

“Children carried the gleaming metal cases containing Barca’s equipment back and forth between the gymnasium and the changing-room. ‘I kept thinking about the Barca 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.’”

In that suffocating environment, Robert Enke embarked on his short and unhappy career with one of the most fabled clubs in Europe.

As Reng, his friend and putative biographer, pieces together the details of that infamous match, it becomes obvious that Enke approached it with considerable trepidation. His first impressions of van Gaal had not been encouraging.

Enke was hot property following two terrific seasons with Benfica but when he called the Dutch man – who had just been appointed as Barca’s manager – to see how van Gaal rated him, he received the gruff response: “I’m not the one who’s going to sign you. The sporting director wants you. I don’t even know you.”

Enke was convinced that his debut was a Catch-22. If Barcelona disposed of Novelda as was expected, nobody would notice him. If the unthinkable happened and they lost, he would become an instant pariah.

With that sense of foreboding, he took to the field and became the central figure in a notorious game for the Catalan giants as they lost 3-2.

Afterwards, Frank de Boer squarely laid the blame for two of the goals on Enke. The defeat consigned Enke to purgatory: he would play just two more full games for Barcelona – two Champions League fixtures in which the result was inconsequential – and 20 minutes against Osasuna.

Worse, he was gradually ostracised by the club, becoming all but invisible to van Gaal and ultimately to the club.

A transfer to Turkish club Fenerbahce was aborted after another freakish lightning strike of bad luck: in his very first game, Fenerbahce were beaten 3-0 by Istanbulspor, the poor relations in the city. Coins, cigarette lighters and bottles rained down on Enke before his debut match was over. He refused to remain in Istanbul.

And so Enke found himself in the twilight world of having signed a contract in which he agreed not to claim a salary from Barcelona and to train at the club when his former team-mates would not be there.

Could there be a lonelier existence for a sportsman?

Enke’s time in Barcelona almost certainly triggered the episodes of depression which ultimately led to his taking his life in November 2009. He managed to resurrect his career to the point where he was expected to be Germany’s first choice goalkeeper at the 2010 World Cup.

But the out-the-blue visits of paralytic fear and numbness never stopped chasing him and they returned with a vengeance during that autumn: on November 10th, two days after playing his 164th match for Hannover 96, he stepped in front of a Tuesday evening commuter train on its way from Bremen. He was 32 and left behind his wife, Teresa and Laila, their adopted daughter.

Ronald Reng’s book about Enke’s life is in part a forensic examination of the extreme range of experiences that characterised his friend’s career and an attempt to understand the conflicting pressures and anxieties that culminated in his death.

The players of Europe’s glamorous football leagues are portrayed as one-dimensional athletes with materially enviable lives; Enke’s desperate exit did not make sense.

In the days after his death, Teresa revealed that her husband had been struggling with depression and was taking medication for his illness.

In Germany, where self expression through football had been transformed in 2006 by Ein Sommermarchen – the summer fairy tale of the World Cup – the reaction even took Enke’s family aback. His coffin was laid out at the Neidersaschen stadium and news agencies announced that his funeral was the biggest in the country since Konrad Adenauer, the former chancellor who had restored the country to post Second World War prosperity.

His death shook German and international football and also the altered the perception that Germans held of how their goalkeepers should be. If, as Napoleon Bonaparte remarked, England was a nation of shopkeepers, then Germany could be reduced to a nation of goalkeepers, with its tradition of stoic, commanding, invulnerable men with individual streaks of eccentricity. Sepp Maier, Bert Trautmann, Harald Schumacher, Oliver Kahn: this was the cast that Enke followed.

But it took him over ten years to establish himself as Germany’s number one and even if the nation’s football fraternity had faith in him at the end, Enke struggled to fully or consistently believe in his right to occupy that spot.

And the road was hard.

He seemed to have an unfortunate knack for playing on teams during unprecedented periods of calamity. In 1998, he was in his third season with Borussia Monchengladbach when the wheels fell off in an October match against Bayer Leverkusen. The team lost 8-2 and Enke had actually made several tremendous saves to prevent a more humiliating score line.

The footage was replayed everywhere because of Enke’s dumbfounded reaction to each goal. A week later, his team lost 7-1 away to Wolfsburg. Enke was the first goalkeeper in the history of the Bundesliga to see 15 goals go past him in a week. Reporters afterwards asked him how he felt.

“Oh. I’d practised getting the ball out of the net the week before,” he quipped.

But the key to the kind of coaching that Enke needed may have been hidden in that traumatic week. It was obvious that he was not at fault for the deluge of goals: he was the last man on a hapless team.

In fact, he was praised for maintaining his composure and exhibiting calmness throughout the humiliating experience. The more he was reassured, the better his performances became.

Over a decade later, he would take a Reiss Profile test and was astonished to discover that recognition from others was hugely important to him. And it had been wholly absent during his tormented seasons at Barcelona and the slow rehabilitation with Tenerife (at one stage, he was the second string goalkeeper there) before Hannover reclaimed him and he steadily reasserted his qualities as an excellent and reliable goalkeeper.

Ronald Reng had become friends with Enke when they were both living in Barcelona. They had made loose plans to sometime write his biography but instead, Reng wrote a book which is both a tribute to the warm, funny, empathetic man he knew and an attempt to provide some answers to the questions his loved ones repeatedly asked.

It becomes clear that Enke was lucky in many ways: he had unstinting support and understanding from Teresa and his family, the most loyal friend imaginable in Jorg Neblung, his agent.

Former team-mates spoke to Reng with candour that is almost forbidden in professional sport. And it is impossible for the reader not to warm to this sometimes serious, sometimes quirky boy with the big smile from Jena in the former East Germany.

He kept a notebook – which Reng quotes from and was in the habit of composing Teresa poems.

In addition to her husband’s illness, the couple had to cope with the death of their first daughter, Lara, from a heart defect at the age of two, in 2006. (Two weeks later, Enke received the bittersweet news that he had been recalled to the German national squad for the first time in seven years).

The couple coped with that tragedy and went on to adopt Laila. In the book, Reng drives around with Enke’s father Dirk who revisits the places that remind him of his son.

At one stage, he says: “Robert had this way of thinking, that if I’m not the best, I must be the worst. And that’s a fundamental aberration. That’s the thought of someone who’s learned I’m only loved for my achievements, not because I simply exist. I thought: Robert, you surely must have noticed that we loved you because you existed and not because you were a good goalkeeper.”

Being a good goalkeeper was how Enke had defined himself since adolescence. Maybe because of that, he looked out for others: one night in 2008, Stuttgart’s young goalkeeper Sven Ulreich was in his parents’ house, mooning over two goals his coach had blamed him for on national television. Enke was outraged when he saw the clip and tracked the young man’s phone number down though a glove manufacturer.

They spoke for half an hour: Enke reassured the younger man that he had not been at fault, that he should not despair, that he had huge talent.

“When I hung up,” Ulreich says in the book, “I had goosebumps.”

Because so much of Enke’s interior life is explored in this biography, various reviews have declared that it “transcends” sport. It does that but it does the opposite too, burrowing down into the deepest level of professional football and presenting the anxieties and pressures that come to bear on its participants – and on those who surround them.

It is hard to know who suffered the greater anxiety during the more perilous stages of Enke’s career: the goalkeeper or his wife. The necessary eccentricity of goalkeepers is often summed up in the film The Goalkeepers Fear of the Penalty but as Reng charts Enke’s career, you get a glimpse behind the curtain of an essentially dark and brutal business where players like Enke in his Barcelona phase – talented but not yet established – are subject to the whims of puppet strings.

Robert Enke eventually prospered but he took those slights to heart more than most and fretted and brooded. Yet he did a masterful job at disguising his lows, so much so that several former friends and many team-mates remember a self-assured and authoritative figure

Of course, he was also that: it is not that he was simply temperamentally unsuited to the naked scrutiny of elite goalkeeping and the unforgiving voice of the mass of people who stand behind those goals singing mocking songs on freezing nights. It was just that football triggered the depression which was the fault line in his psychic armoury.

By any employment standards, the treatment of Enke at Barcelona seems cold to the point of callousness and it is hard not to regard what happened to the German during his time there as a stain on the great tradition of the Catalan club.

Victor Valdes, who emerged as Barca’s number one goalkeeper during Enke’s two lost seasons there, remembered his former team-mate with watery eyes. He had come up through the B team and used to study Enke in those first training sessions with star struck admiration.

“I saw Robert at training every day and I’d like to think I’m not mistaken when I see a goalkeeper. He was a great one.”

By the end of his life, Enke had at least proven that he was exceptionally good, even if the breaks of the game did not always go his way. Late in the summer of 2009, his depression returned with the devastating swiftness and impact of a hammer blow. “A goalkeeper is trained all his life to give no sign of despair, disappointment or fear,” Reng notes in the epilogue.

“That ability always to appear in control of things helped Robert to live on when depression took hold of him. And that gift became his fate when the illness led him to seek his own death: he concealed his intentions so well that no one could help him any longer.”

A Life Too Shortis a sports biography about as much as BS Johnson's classic The Unfortunates is a sports novel. Both are books about grief. But football runs through the heart of Enke's story and this book belongs to the first rank of publications on the game of minds and souls that exists behind the what the beautiful game that is seen on the field.

It is a both a fitting tribute to a lost husband, son and friend but it is also a salutary warning to the great football clubs of the world to keep a closer guard on the mental as well as physical wellbeing of the parade of youngsters whose lives they control.