Bundesliga resumes after Enke’s death

FRANKFURT (AP)—Bundesliga leader Bayer Leverkusen travels to Bayern Munich when the season resumes after the international break and the suicide of Hannover’s goalkeeper Robert Enke.

While the top match of the 13th round is Sunday in the Allianz Arena, most of the attention Saturday will be on Hannover’s game at Schalke and Enke’s replacement Florian Fromlowitz.

“I didn’t lose a competitor, I lost a friend,” the 23-year-old Fromlowitz said. “He was like a teacher to me, he’s given me a lot. He will remain the No. 1.”

Enke threw himself in a front of a train nine days ago after battling depression for years.

“I have to put it out of my mind even though I know that many people will be looking at me,” said Fromlowitz, who already has six Bundesliga games behind him this season while Enke was injured or ill. “Robert would have wanted us to play. We are going to do it for him and I will do it for him.”

Hannover players will wear special jerseys, with a small No. 1 inside a circle on the front.

Bayern’s distractions have been of a different nature—defender Philipp Lahm was fined an undisclosed sum for criticizing the management in a newspaper interview and striker Luca Toni was fined for leaving the stadium when he was substituted at halftime in a 1-1 home draw with Schalke.

While apologizing to his teammates, Toni said his reaction was “the consequence of four long months of inconveniences and ‘misunderstandings’ with the present coach.”

The present coach, Louis van Gaal, hardly needs any additional pressure— Bayern is all but out of the Champions League and the draw against Schalke dropped his team six points behind Leverkusen.

“This is now the game of the games in the first half of the season,” Bayern’s general manager Uli Hoeness said. “Everyone is now very focused on this game.”

Goalkeeper Joerg Butt, who played more than 200 games for Leverkusen earlier in his career, said Bayern was in a “serious situation.”

“It’s clear, we have to win against Leverkusen,” he said. “We can’t allow ourselves another flop in the Bundesliga.”

The only good news for Bayern have come off the field, with the club extending its shirt sponsorship contract with Deutsche Telekom until 2013. No details were given but Hoeness has called it a “good contract” and the German media speculated it was worth ?25 million ($37.4 million) a season.

Jupp Heynckes, who came out of semiretirement and guided Bayern for the final five games of the last season after the dismissal of Juergen Klinsmann, is now in charge at Leverkusen and the team is three points clear at the top with 26 points.

“Without those five games I wouldn’t have returned to coaching,” Heynckes said. “As a sober person, I am likely to go into that stadium as I would into any other, but what will happen in the 90 minutes I can’t say.”

“One thing should be clear though: we are going to Munich to win,” Heynckes said.

Leverkusen has not won in Munich in 20 years.

“We have gained stability in our defense, we have scored the second most goals and all this makes me confident although we know that Bayern is a top-class team,” he said.

Werder Bremen and Hamburger SV have 23 points, Schalke 22, defending champion Wolfsburg and promoted Mainz 21, Hoffenheim 20, the same as Bayern in eighth place.

Hamburg hosts Bochum on Sunday, while Werder travels to Freiburg on Sunday.

In other games Saturday, Wolfsburg hosts Nuremberg, Stuttgart plays Hertha Berlin, Hoffenheim travels to Cologne, Eintracht Frankfurt meets Borussia Moenchengladbach and Mainz visits Borussia Dortmund.