Robert Enke, Goalkeeping & The Difficulty of Saving
One day I got put in goal. Because no one else wanted to go in. I ended up staying there for the next decade.
By the time I was eleven, I passed the trials and was one of two goalkeepers that represented the Island where I lived. We got a letter home with an official stamp on it. The academy was called the ‘Centre of Excellence’. Dad bought new gloves in celebration, they felt large and loose on my tiny hands.
It felt like a massive deal to a child. Being a footballer is the default dream of a boy, apparently.
If you haven’t got a dream, just select that one. It’s the stock photo dream. The preset wallpaper dream when you log in to your boyhood.
Time passed. We played in England and France.
I got really nervous before matches. Afraid I’d drop catches.
The goal felt massive. One is the most solitary number.
In my teenage years, at club level I used to belong to a team called Grouville, I was the captain and the goalkeeper. I got on with the other lads. But I was torn. Because I was asked to join a bigger, better team in a bigger league and therefore have bigger and better chances of being a footballer, which would give me bigger and better chances of having a footballer’s wife, earning a footballer’s wage, driving a footballer’s car and having a footballer’s level of happiness.
My peers at my original club wanted me to stay and my peers at my school wanted me to join the new club. Either way it was peer pressure. I made my choice and left for a new club Wanderers.
It was my brand new, bigger and better team. Except, it was short lived. I soon wondered why I went. I played one disastrous season, lost all confidence and quit football pretty much forever. Something I loved, became something I hated.This was because I learned the hard way that a team is not just a shared uniform. We all wore the same kit at Wanderers, but I never felt part of their team. The children were richer. Blonder. Got more girls. They also said that I looked like Borat (that’s quite funny to be fair). Other kids from my school and even my best friend, realised that they would rather fit in, than stick up for me, so they joined in or said nothing. It was the kind of cowardly move I would have made so I don’t mind.
This was a new experience for me. I was used to just witnessing bullying at school, where I was on the fringes of the popular crowd, but here, I think I was more like a victim. So, this is how it feels I thought. A team is a shared world view to identify with. I liked books and poetry, and that was fine at my old club, but this one called me gay for it, or players would sardonically tell me to spit some rhymes.
I knew it was time to get out football for good when I thought I tore a ligament in my ankle. I went to the GP and I was really disappointed, because I hadn’t torn it.
We had a big match on the horizon, in the big stadium, against a big team, to win a big cup and everyone just kept telling me how big it all was. I felt small and ashamed. I didn’t want to play. I was dreading it. I was so worried about making a mistake in front of all those people, and I just knew that I would, because as a goalkeeper, you only make mistakes when you worry about making them. It is the reason that goalkeepers are so eccentric. The pressure is also the reason that goalkeepers suffer depression. Football is a cruel place and the stigma about mental health remains pervasive on and off the pitch.
Time passed. Dad used to watch with a flask.
Then one time when I looked back there was nothing but grass
waiting on my white line until sadness came to pass.
At the time, aged sixteen, I was clearly suffering anxiety about football. It wasn’t an ordinary level of match day nerves. My poor performances had meant that I was second choice goalkeeper for my new team, which suited me fine because I hated playing. Unfortunately, the first-choice keeper, who I suspect also hated playing from the conversations I had with him, was injured — which meant I would have to play the BIG match.
Playing tennis at school, I had felt a sharp twinge and a roll of my ankle. I had hoped it was torn. It wasn’t. So, I was torn. I didn’t know how to get out of the BIG match if I wasn’t injured. I couldn’t tell the manager I was nervous; I’d be laughed out the changing room or he’d probably clip me around the ears. This left only one route. If I could only get out of the match by proven injury — I would have to injure myself. Because my ankle ligament wasn’t torn. I would have to tear it myself.
The fact that this was my mindset and I normalised it, is indicative of how repressed my mental health was. I thought this was perfectly okay as a course of action. After getting home from the GP, on a sunny Monday afternoon, five days before the BIG match, I went out into the garden. No one was home. There was a low stone wall that bordered the plants: concrete. Making sure that I positioned my ankle right. I kicked it. It hurt a lot. But not enough. I figured the more it hurt, the less chance I would play. So, I kicked and kept kicking the concrete as hard as I could until my ankle was swollen numb and the pain was unbearable. I couldn’t walk up the stairs to get into my house. I couldn’t walk at all actually. It was the only time I ever got involved in football violence. I didn’t play the match. In fact, I didn’t play high level football ever, ever again.
Injury time. All them goalkeepers living on the line.
Cech ourselves before our heads get hurt
but we wave play on and say we’re fine.
What happened to me was a minor. But when you get to the higher levels of football, everything is magnified. So, naturally, at the highest level of football — certain aspects of life are magnified too — like anxiety and sadness.
The Story of Robert Enke:
There is a moment in Robert Enke’s last match that he looks heavenward with a whispered goodbye. He kicks the ball in a final clearance, three minutes into extra time and then brings his hands together to applaud those who are watching him, bringing his gloved hands together. He was thirty-two years old and he would never again wear those gloves. His final interview is delivered with clear eyed focus, a tunnel-vision certainty of direction. A one-track mind.
Football matches are given injury time, to compensate for the seconds spent down and out. A human life is not afforded the same allowance.
On 10th November 2009, Robert Enke told his wife, Teresa, that he was leaving the house for goalkeeper training, for his club Hannover. He didn’t return that evening and Teresa phoned the goalkeeper coach, to be told there had been no training, and that Enke had not been seen. He told her to stay calm. In Enke’s room, Teresa found a letter. She called the Emergency Services. There was a heartbeat pause and a breath on the other end of the line, as the receiver realised who they were talking about. Germany’s national goalkeeper.
Goalkeeping is lonely. You are the last line of defence behind the last line of defence. One mistake and it will not be forgotten. You will be defined by the times that you have dropped the ball, because you are expected to catch it. One wrong move and history will jeer your name from the stands. Players like Lois Karius and Robert Greene have become synonymous with their split-second failures, despite their years of hard work to reach the highest echelons of the game. This is the reality of goalkeeping.
Goalkeepers are always talking. It is a position in which communication is vital. You can watch Enke constantly speaking to those around him — yet these players and friends who knew him so well, did not know that he wore depression like a shirt that he could not take off.
At 6.15pm, at a train crossing in Eilvese, near to Enke’s home, he was hit by a Regional Express travelling from Hamburg to Bremen at 100mph. The application of brakes was too late, and as so often occurs, what was already in motion could not be stopped in time.
Back in Enke’s kitchen, there were notes in his handwriting, on the fridge, reminding him to order tickets for friends for an upcoming fixture with Bayern Munich. He was the captain of his club, he was one of the world’s top players, who could have played anywhere, and have achieved anything, but Robert Enke chose to end it all. The goalkeeper who saved for a living, could not save his own life.
Talk.
