the staff of an agency that’s supposed to look after professional sportspeople in everyday life. ‘Fridge-filler is another term,’ says Jörg.
He’d really wanted to be an industrial designer. During the entrance exam for technical college in Hanover he had looked out of the window in search of inspiration. He saw the bile-green trams driving past the gardens of the town-houses, drew his next sketches in that colour, and was rejected. After that he wanted to do something completely different. He studied sports science. One of his professors, Karl-Heinz Drygalsky, became chairman of Borussia Mönchengladbach. When Drygalsky took him on as fitness coach in 1994, Bayern Munich was the only team in the Bundesliga with such a post.
Jörg thought professional football would be pretty much the same as athletics. He assumed a Bundesliga team’s medical staff would work hand in hand, and the head coach would take an interest in individual training plans. Then he saw his first head coach, Bernd Krauss, forcing the players to run excessively hard endurance races, contrary to all training theory, supposedly as a way of schooling their will. He experienced Borussia’s physiotherapist denigrating him to the coaching staff to make sure that injured players came to him first. ‘All backroom staff in a Bundesliga side are constantly courting the favour of the coach and the players,’ Jörg says. ‘And in order to please them, if necessary they sometimes worked against their better judgement.’
A bell rings in the corridor outside his airy office on the third floor of an old factory building. It’s a woman with a basket full of sandwiches. She does her rounds every day because the multimedia designers and communication advisers in offices like this on Lichtstrasse in Cologne have no time for lunch. Jörg Neblung, northern German and blond, still looking like a decathlete at the age of forty-three, now runs his own football agency. During our interview he sometimes turns round as if talking to his shelf, where he has set up some goalkeeping gloves and photographs of Robert, and a candle.
There are hundreds of kinds of friendship, and of the one formed in 1998 between Robert Enke and Jörg Neblung the fact will always remain that Jörg was supposed to worry about him . But the will to strive together for goals is more of a bond than most emotions.
Jörg could understand that in his difficult moments Robert wanted to sort things out all by himself. ‘I’m like that too,’ he says.
In the autumn of 1998, when Borussia Mönchengladbach couldn’t stop making mistakes and had a six-week, seven-game run of losses, Robert turned himself into an individual sportsman. The loneliness of the goalkeeper has often been exaggerated and lamented in literature, but for the goalkeeper in a declining team, loneliness is a blessing. He plays his own game and finds his victories in defeat. He conceded two goals to Bayern Munich but thought about the five fine saves he had shown. At least he’s still making saves, the experts said. ‘While chaos rages, he stays calmly in Gladbach,’ wrote the D ü sseldorfer Express .
8. Robert in 1998 during his time with Mönchengladbach .
‘Calm, serenity, equilibrium, class’ – those were the qualities attributed to him by the distinguished coach Jupp Heynckes, who had led Real Madrid to their Champions League victory six months earlier and who now, on a sabbatical in his home town of Mönchengladbach, often attended Borussia’s games. ‘He had always been more advanced than the rest of us, in his ideas, in his behaviour, in his speech,’ said Borussia’s midfielder Marcel Ketelaer, who had played with Robert in the national youth team. ‘He was always more grown up than we were.’
‘Mental strength’ was a fashionable expression of the newly psychologised sport. Everyone saw the Borussia goalkeeper as a model of the new sportsman. They gallantly overlooked the fact that he sometimes