Free A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng

told his team, but he couldn’t do without both! He nominated Pflipsen as deputy team captain for the next game against Bayer Leverkusen, on 30 October 1998.
    It was the day Robert Enke became nationally famous.
    Marco Villa injured his knee in the tenth minute; the ligament was torn. He was lying on the edge of the pitch being examined by the doctor when the first goal was scored. After being substituted, Marco hobbled to the club-room to watch the game on television with an ice pack on his knee. When he turned the set on, he learned that Borussia’s central defender Patrik Andersson had had to leave the pitch as well because of injury, and the score stood at 2–0 to Leverkusen. Robert was sitting on the ground – his hands hanging limply over his knees, which were drawn up to his chest – with an expression of profound incomprehension on his face. That was how he became famous, because the footage was repeated as often as if it were a snippet of Chaplin slapstick: Robert Enke sitting uncomprehendingly on the ground after a goal, and then after another.
    Mönchengladbach lost 8–2 to Bayer Leverkusen that day. ‘Carnival in Gladbach,’ the fans sang. The biggest debacle in thirty years, the radio commentators cried. And the young goalkeeper had prevented even worse things happening!
    Robert wished next Saturday, the next game, would come quickly, so that he could leave the horror behind him.
    A week later, they played in Wolfsburg. Teresa met some of the wives of Borussia’s footballers in a bar in Mönchengladbach to watch the match on television. After fifty-three minutes of play Uwe Kamps’s girlfriend said to her, ‘Oh God, four goals was the most Uwe ever let in, and after that he was always finished.’ Brian O’Neil had just made it 5–1 to VfL Wolfsburg. Their fans sang, ‘Only three more, only three more!’ Goals to top Leverkusen’s feat from last week, they meant. The game ended 7–1.
    Robert Enke was famous. No goalkeeper in the Bundesliga had ever let in fifteen goals in a week. The reporters outside the changing-room asked how he felt, and put on sympathetic faces. ‘Oh,’ Robert replied, ‘I’d practised getting the ball out of the net the week before.’
    The day after the Wolfsburg game he went for a walk in the fields with Teresa and the dogs. Victory or defeat, that was their Sunday routine.
    ‘So, Enke the Aunt Sally,’ said Teresa.
    And even though every goal had tormented him, for all his despondency he was suddenly able to explode with laughter.

    7. 30 October 1998: Robert Enke at the game against Bayer Leverkusen that ended in an 8–2 defeat .
    ‘We were very easygoing,’ Teresa says. ‘The important thing was that there was nothing he could have done about the goals. Then we were able to joke about it.’
    After unforgettable defeats like these Robert had to resort to little tricks to maintain his composure. ‘I convinced myself that the team had let me down. That helped me to calm down.’ He had often reproached himself as a goalkeeper – for goals that weren’t really his fault, or for disappointing his team-mates even though no one was disappointed in him. He never received as much sympathy and forgiveness as he did after those fifteen goals. ‘And God protect this young goalkeeper – he can’t help it!’ Teresa heard the television commentator saying in the bar, as the camera caught Robert on the ground with his uncomprehending expression for the last time. As he received evidence from all quarters of how impressively calmly he had gone on playing in an intimidated team, he forgot that his own nerves had once been a-flutter, with Carl Zeiss in Leipzig and during that first winter in Mönchengladbach. ‘I’m not so psychologically unstable that I’m crapping myself before each game,’ he told the sportswriters. ‘You don’t need to worry about me suffering lasting damage.’
    The more people praised him for his calmness and confidence, the more serenely he