by Reng, Ronald
In a game that splashed around rather than flowed, Riquelme, the saviour who had been demoted to the status of relief staff, put Baby Barça 1–0 up. There were twenty-five minutes left, twenty-five minutes during which Robert constantly fidgeted, his concentration at its highest level. Bruges were suddenly there again – but he never needed to intervene because there was a defender’s leg in the way. The game was nearly over. One more attack, Bruges on the left wing, a fine exchange of passes suddenly leaving two of Baby Barça’s defenders running at nothing; Ristic on the ball, free, by the corner of the box; he could shoot, instead he crosses high, fast, towards the six-yard line. The goalkeeper must come out and collect the ball, but ahead of him is a five-man buffalo-herd, three enemies, two friends, and he’ll just bounce off them if he tries to take the cross. Robert takes two steps forward, then stops. Martens is the first to get his head to the ball. The fans behind Robert’s goal jump into the air with their arms aloft, the ones with the quickest reactions already shouting ‘Goal!’ The header is firm and well directed. At the last moment Robert tips it over the bar. The fans’ hands go to their heads and they forget to shut their mouths.
‘Riquelme decided a game in which Iniesta and Enke shone,’ it said on the front page of El Mundo Deportivo the morning after the 1–0 victory. Francisco Carrasco, known as ‘Lobo’, the Wolf, European Cup winner in 1979 with Barça and now an analyst with Mundo Deportivo, wrote, ‘Enke’s performance was a message to Louis van Gaal: I’m here if you need me’, and the trainer, who was constantly barking, revealed a compassionate side. No one is emotionally one-dimensional, even van Gaal can be sympathetic, it just isn’t always so easy to spot it. He never talked in public about individual players, the trainer said at the press conference, ‘but a goalkeeper is a lonely player, which is why today he deserves a special mention: Enke was very good, in the end he saved our victory for us’.
Robert, Teresa noted in her diary, ‘no longer wanted to admit that he had played a terrific game’.
One game wasn’t going to change anything. He would remain a substitute. Bonano was now number one and playing well. Once a goalkeeper had ended up on the subs bench it was hard for him to come off it again; you didn’t switch goalkeeper at the drop of a hat. Three years earlier, at Benfica, Bossio had never been given another chance, just because he had once blown it during the pre-season match against Bayern Munich, and Robert had profited from Bossio’s misfortune. But not many people remember the luck they once enjoyed in the past in situations where fortune seems to be favouring others.
Quiet, brief joy such as he’d felt after the game in Bruges only ever made Robert think about how pointless everything was. The day after his magnificent display in Belgium, he devoted himself to his worries. He was the first of the Barça team to call Patrik Andersson to enquire about his health after an operation on his thigh. Robert identified with people who were having a hard time.
After lunch Robert regularly went to Manresa, half an hour to the north, inland, near the gleaming mountain of Montserrat, Catalonia’s national symbol. Teresa worked mornings at the animal shelter in Manresa. When he visited they took the shelter’s dogs for walks. They had to take most of them out individually so that they didn’t squabble and fight; they’d walk a circuit ten times in a row.
With their new friends from the German colony in Sant Cugat they drove to the beach at Sitges, they had barbecues in the garden; Robert went jogging with the men and cheered on Teresa and Dickens at horse-jumping shows – who would have thought that old chestnut horse would jump like that? It was November, and they were living in the sun. He could still forget, at least for a few hours, when he relaxed with friends. If he was suddenly absent for a moment, mid-conversation, mid-laughter, no one said anything. People always treat a professional footballer, a star, with special consideration, even friends, even if they don’t intend to.
One Sunday he rang me. ‘Have you heard what Victor’s done?’
Victor Valdés, twenty years young, a Primera División professional for only four months, had turned the world upside down. He was mutinying against van Gaal. After Valdés lost his place to Bonano the trainer sent him back to the B-team so that he could keep his hand in. He wasn’t having it, Valdés explained. ‘My team is the first team.’ He didn’t turn up for the B-team game against Segunda B side FC Reus. He turned off his phone.
Louis van Gaal, who usually roared all the time, was speechless.
‘Victor knows no self-doubt,’ said Robert. It sounded admiring, it sounded irritated. ‘And of course I sometimes wonder, what if I was like that?’
‘I made a lot of youthful mistakes,’ says Valdés, and the huge eagle on his black T-shirt flexes its wings. ‘But you must understand the situation. A season earlier I got an offer from FC Villarreal. I phoned van Gaal: “I can go to Villarreal.” And van Gaal said to me, “No, stay, I’ll give you a chance in the first team.” When he sent me back to the B-team, I felt betrayed. Today I understand what the coach was aiming for. At the time I felt humiliated.’
Four days after he, a twenty-year-old newcomer, had openly challenged the autocratic coach, Valdés apologised, without really appreciating that he had done anything wrong. He was allowed back in, ‘but nothing will be as it was before’, warned van Gaal. Valdés would do extra shifts with Frans Hoek. No one mentioned the idea of punitive training; he would have to catch up with what he’d missed, they said. The other substitute goalkeeper was to join in – it couldn’t hurt.
Alone with Valdés and Hoek, Robert trained at La Masía. The goalkeeping coach shouted, ‘Esto no, Victor. You’re going down too early, you’re speculating. I want you to wait a long time before the shot comes, like van der Sar.’ After a quarter of an hour Valdés, spitting with fury, called off the training session. ‘It ended badly,’ he says. ‘Hoek and I were throwing footballs at each other.’ Robert stood to the side in amazement, doubting himself at least twice as much as he doubted Victor.
But something’s wrong. Something does not add up as Victor Valdés sits on the designer sofa in the Portakabin talking about the old days. The Valdés on the sofa seems the exact opposite of the Valdés he’s describing. ‘At the time I was very withdrawn,’ he explains openly. ‘I didn’t watch football on television because I thought I had to isolate myself from everything to do with the game.’
A baby and a coach transformed him, says Valdés: his son Dylan, now a year old, who has filled him with joy, and Pep Guardiola, a coach who wants more than mere success – his players are supposed to love the sport as fiercely as he does. Victor, said Guardiola, if you go on like this, eventually your career will be over and you won’t have enjoyed this wonderful job for a single day because you’re always tense, because success is the only thing you want. Watch some football on TV, try to understand the game. ‘Pep completely changed my view of football. He taught me to lower the intensity during a game and coldly analyse what was going on rather than just lurking there with grim resolution.’
Victor Valdés became Barça’s undisputed goalkeeper, a Champions League winner in 2006, 2009 and 2011, who plays as confidently as van der Sar.
So was Robert right to think that Valdés wasn’t affected by anything, that he knew no doubts, no anxieties, on the football field? ‘Perhaps Robert thought about blunders more than I did. Certainly at the time I didn’t care about anything. I’d ended up in a state where mistakes simply slipped off me.’
Then Valdés smiles, a man so self-contained that he can happily remember even the worst of times. ‘You know, between the ages of eight and eighteen there was so much pressure in my life that I couldn’t find peace.’ Everything revolved around football, and ‘the mere thought of next Sunday’s game horrified me. Playing in goal was, to put it mildly, a special sort of suffering.’ The fear of making mistakes, the fear of disappointing others – we’ve heard that before.
Robert kept his distance from Valdés. They were friendly, but their conversation remained superficial. Mostly
from that distance Robert watched his rival with a mixture of admiration and annoyance. How much good would it have done him to learn that this supposedly invulnerable adolescent had once experienced the same anxieties?
After training Robert and I often met in the lobby outside the Camp Nou changing-rooms, whose walls were hung with oil paintings of dramatic sea-battles. We’d sink into the leather sofas and talk with the passion of philosophers about goalkeeping gloves – about why, for instance, the seam on the thumb had to face outwards. He still loved the gossip of the goalkeeping guild.
‘I’m not surprised things aren’t going well for the team,’ he said to me at the end of 2002, and that was a surprise for a moment, given Barça’s quality – until he carried on. ‘I’m familiar with that. Teams that I play on always fall short of expectations.’ But his face wasn’t joining in with any self-irony now. His eyes barely stirred. He seemed to be talking without moving his mouth. ‘You have to keep telling yourself there are other things besides football, but …’ He left the sentence unfinished. ‘I’ve got moody.’
I told him what I had heard from an agent, the South African Rob Moore. At the begnning of December, Barça’s managing director Javier Pérez Farguell had given some middlemen with international contacts like Moore a list of seven professionals who were up for sale in the winter break. Robert’s name was on it.
He didn’t reply. His face was frozen. His eyes were those of a man in search of a lost laugh.
Eike Immel, Christoph Daum’s goalkeeping coach at Austria Wien, phoned. They were building an exciting squad with a huge sponsor. They were very interested in Robert.
Austria. Robert was just discovering that things weren’t always necessarily wonderful at the biggest clubs, but the placid Austrian league was perhaps going too far the other way.
Immel called again. At first it would just be a loan – six months.
He wasn’t thinking about changing clubs at the moment, said Robert.
Barça entered the Christmas holidays tenth in the table. Madrid’s Galácticos had collected almost twice as many points. ‘You know what happened here again today?’ Robert said to Marco Villa on the phone. ‘Van Gaal got up on a massage bench in front of the whole team and yelled at us from above.’
The nomadic spirit was driving Robert and Marco further and further apart. To Lisbon, Barcelona, Ried, Athens and Nuremberg they wandered, but however far they ended up from each other they stayed in close contact. They could only see each other once or twice a year, but Robert had got used to this long-distance friendship long ago. He believed ‘that you only have three or four real friends in life’ and rarely the good fortune to live in the same town as them. Marco and Christina came to Sant Cugat for New Year’s Eve. It was a kind of honeymoon. They had got married before Christmas, and football left them no time for a proper honeymoon and visiting friends, so they combined the two.
They saw in the New Year at the Plaça de Catalunya. At midnight, with each of the chimes that announced the start of 2003 they swallowed a grape, following the Spanish New Year tradition, las uvas de suerte – the grapes of good luck.
‘Robbi and I are going home, we’re tired,’ Marco said a little later.
Teresa gave Robert a critical look. Was he lapsing into melancholy again?
Teresa and Christina went dancing with friends. Robert and Marco went off to their beds. Or so they said. At home in Sant Cugat they opened a bottle of wine. ‘Tell me stories from our time in the army again,’ said Robert. When Teresa and Christina got home at four in the morning they heard loud laughter coming from the living-room.
At some point over the next few days Teresa had an opportunity to speak to Marco on his own. ‘You’re one of the few people Robbi will open up to. Please try and help him.’
Marco had always seen clowning around as his forte. ‘If you had asked me when I was nineteen about the mind I’d have said, “What’s that?”’ But he’s a dedicated sportsman with a strong urge to achieve goals, so he stubbornly set about pulling his friend out of a life that was lived almost entirely within. You don’t sound good today, Robbi; how are things between you and the goalkeeping coach? he asked. Robert usually quickly turned the conversation to other people, events or objects so that he didn’t have to talk about himself. Marco went on asking him questions.
It would take years, but eventually Robert would phone him of his own accord if he was in a bad way.
They were only fifteen when Marco, playing for North Rhine, stormed the Thuringian goal on his own during the federal states Youth Cup in Wedau. He saw the goalkeeper in front of him, he knew Robert Enke from the Germany youth team, and the thought ran through his head: you’ll never score against him! He shot, Robert saved, Marco heard the cries of disappointment from his team-mates and he lowered his head. The goalkeeper, on the ground, with the ball in his damned hands, smiled at him and said sympathetically to Marco, ‘Next time you’ll score.’
You don’t forget something like that.
At the age of seventeen Villa was bought by Borussia Mönchengladbach from Uerdingen; he was a youth player, but Borussia paid a professional transfer fee, 500,000 German marks. After six months the assistant trainer told him, ‘You should be training with the Bundesliga team.’
‘But I’m still at school.’
‘Then you’ll just have to give up school.’
On Saturdays Marco stood as a ball-boy at the edge of the pitch during Borussia’s Bundesliga games. He recalls feeling a great rush whenever the stadium announcer said, ‘Goal to Borussia! By number nine, Martin Dahlin!’, and the cheering of the crowd buzzed like electricity in the air. ‘It was the only dream I had: just once to hear the stadium announcer at the Bökelberg say my name.’ He left school a year and a half before his A-levels.
In August 1996 the stadium announcer said, ‘Goal to Borussia! By number thirty-two, Marco Villa!’ He was eighteen, Borussia’s youngest ever Bundesliga striker. After seven games he had scored three goals; nothing like it had ever happened in Germany before. ‘Villamania’ his team-mate Kalle Pflipsen called it. ‘We’ll be celebrating – with non-alcoholic beer,’ his father told the television reporters who interviewed him as well, because all of a sudden everything about Marco seemed important. ‘I had heard the stadium announcer say my name,’ says Marco. ‘I had no dreams any more.’
He’s driving his little Toyota along a country road, right next to the A14 between Giulianova and Resto degli Abruzzi. He’s been playing in Italy for seven years, for L’Aquila Calcio right now, and he’s unconsciously assumed some of the country’s customs, like using rural roads to avoid paying the motorway toll. He recently heard a song on the radio, by Andrea Bocelli, and Marco, who has been listening very closely to song-lyrics lately, recognised himself in the refrain: ‘No one taught me how to live life.’
During their time together at Borussia, when Marco and Robert shared a hotel room on away trips, they were in Los Angeles for a training-camp when one evening Marco announced, ‘I’m going out again.’ Robert rolled his eyes. Marco winked at him and disappeared.
As he crept through the underground car park out of the hotel, big Stefan Effenberg was making his way through the hotel lobby to the door.
‘Effe, where are you going?’ called the coach.
‘Just to get a breath of air.’
‘Oh, okay.’
With Effenberg and two other players, Marco stayed in a nightclub until the early hours of the morning. ‘In five years’ time,’ Effenberg said to him, ‘either you’re going to be a great player or no one will remember you.’ Marco took it as a compliment.
Then he tore his cruciate ligament for the first time. After four years with Borussia he had played twenty-four games, only two of them over the whole ninety minutes. To those three goals from his first seven games he had added only one. Marco had a dozen or more images of near misses in his head, and they wouldn’t go away. Ried, Athens, Nuremberg – everywhere he went the coaches saw the talent he
had revealed in Mönchengladbach, and everywhere injuries got in the way. In Nuremberg he was out of action for fourteen out of twenty months – his knee, his muscles, always something new. After rehab training he sometimes had lunch at the students’ canteen with Nuremberg’s goalkeeping coach Michael Fuchs. Fuchs had food tokens. ‘Eh, Villa? Cheap here, isn’t it?’ said a student who recognised him, and Marco enjoyed the tease. He was a clown, after all.
16. Robert with Teresa and his best friend Marco Villa (left).
At home his wife was crying.
‘What’s up with you?’
She threw herself on the floor and drummed her fists on the carpet. ‘You’re only normal when you’re injured.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Marco. He wasn’t injured at the time so he was too consumed by an internal pressure to perform to think about what was wrong with him. Instead he thought anxiously for a few minutes about whether the canteen lunches might be damaging his form.
The first time he began to wonder must have been in early spring 2003. He had kept his promise to Teresa not just to talk about what he and Robert were doing, but about how they were. Six months after Novelda, Robert was in a better state. Van Gaal had been fired, but Bonano was still playing under the new coach, Radomir Antic´. ‘But,’ Robert told Marco, ‘something I think: I’m almost happier when I’m just a substitute player.’
‘What?’ said Marco, and only thought about it after he’d put the phone down. He actually felt exactly the same.
Robert’s mood had improved, even though his situation at Barça hadn’t. Had time healed wounds? Had he discovered a way to deal better with setbacks? Had he actually discovered the happy substitute’s secret of being able to watch a game without any stress? ‘I think mostly it had something to do with the fact that the end of the season was approaching,’ says Jörg Neblung. ‘Robbi knew he would have to change clubs then, so he didn’t take everything that happened at Barça all that seriously anymore.’