Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  2

  Cantona and his ‘band of merry men’.

  AUXERRE:

  THE APPRENTICE

  Éric’s parents didn’t share his enthusiasm for moving 600 kilometres north of Marseilles – to put it mildly. He had just celebrated his fifteenth birthday; it was one thing to board a few nights a week at Mazargues, quite another to find himself among people he knew nothing of, with only the telephone to link him to the clan. ‘Why not Nice?’ they asked him. ‘We could come and see you every weekend.’ Jean-Marie, the most even-tempered and ‘reasonable’ of the three brothers, also advised him not to pack his suitcase for Burgundy. But Éric stood his ground. Some of the arguments he used when the family discussed his future showed him to be rather more than a stubborn, hot-headed teenager who could be bought for a few shirts. He wouldn’t be the first child of Les Caillols to seek success a long way away from the Provençal sun, he said. Five years previously, René Marsiglia had left SOC for Boulogne-sur-Mer when only thirteen years old, and was now an established professional with Lille Olympique Sporting Club. It was well-known that southern clubs had a perverse tendency not to look after their own, and that local fans easily turned against footballers who had grown up in the same streets as them – as Marseille fans would when Éric joined their club in 1988.

  Éric had a profound respect for Monsieur Roux. He felt at ease in the unprepossessing atmosphere of Auxerre, where he had had such fun splashing about and training with what he knew instantly was an exceptional group of youngsters. Crucially, AJA trusted their young players to represent the club in the third division championship, where the reserves played, whereas he would be likely – no, certain – to be ignored by the management of haughty Nice for such games. And how could he improve if he didn’t play? Thanks to Henri Émile’s recommendation, he had recently been called up by the French under-seventeen national squad. This meant two things: his qualities were now recognized within the game, but he would also need to fight even harder to survive in the football world. Auxerre would provide him with a chance to measure himself against tougher opponents in a competitive environment. Little by little, Éric won over his family. Albert took his son’s decision with good grace in the end. Auxerre wasn’t the end of the world after all.

  So Joseph and Lucienne drove Éric to Burgundy, where they enjoyed lunch with Guy Roux on the banks of the River Yonne. ‘When we were served dessert, I told them, “But you just have to come back to see him!” His Italian grandfather replied, “Oh, Auxerre is far, I’m old, I don’t know . . .” “Listen to me,” I said. “When he plays for France the first time, you’ll have to come and see me.” Well, he was nineteen when he played against [West] Germany – and the grandfather hadn’t forgotten.’

  Within a matter of weeks, the recruit had become a full-time apprentice, the youngest in his age category, and was training with the reserve team. The summers spent in the shade of Joseph’s and Lucienne’s cabanon belonged to the childhood he had left behind; should he return to the Côte Bleue, it would be like opening, briefly, a window on his own past. But Éric felt sure he could live with the brutality of this break with his former life. He wasn’t cowed by his new surroundings, quite the contrary, in fact. Was it because Albert and Eléonore were not there to keep him in check any longer? The ‘difficult’ teenager turned into a genuine hellraiser. Célestin Oliver had seen in him a ‘born leader’; but maybe not of the kind of gang that soon congregated around the imposing youth. Their misdemeanours were confined to the club – for the most part. Basile Boli has recounted how this ‘gang’, which Roux called ‘Canto and his band of merry men’ (on that occasion, Cantona, Prunier, Vahirua, Basile and his brother Roger), would buy clapped-out cars and organize ‘rodeos’ – lifesize dodgems – in the local rubbish tip. Roux never knew about this, thankfully; had he done so, the punishment would have been severe. A strict disciplinarian, he thought nothing of fining trainees who earned barely anything. Once, several of the youngsters, who’d taken part in a remarkable victory over the reserves of St Étienne, were spotted in a nightclub after the game. Roux was told by one of his many spies, and dug into the culprits’ pockets to buy a billiards table for the academy, which was referred to as the ‘Boli-Cantona’ table for years afterwards.

  On the whole, however, the merry men kept themselves to themselves. They did not vandalize phone booths or terrify the good burghers of Auxerre. But they played pranks, wreaked havoc in the dormitory, and generally brought the coaching staff close to a communal nervous breakdown. ‘These kids were very close to each other,’ Roux told me. A brief pause, then: ‘They were also up to no good most of the time. Daniel Rolland, a lovely man who adored them, and who was probably the best educator in French football at the time, just couldn’t cope with them.’ ‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘Me? I was the court of appeal. Éric came to my office when Daniel Rolland just couldn’t bear it any more. Éric was very violent, in his language too. But also charming when he could keep his temper in check. Generous, and hard-working, with a really good heart behind all the excesses. Tell me – between a nicey-nicey lazybones with no talent and a super-worker with an awful temper on him, what would be your choice? Mine was quickly made.’

  Something had struck me: to qualify Cantona’s ‘awful temper’, Roux had used the adjective caractériel. It is a very strong word indeed, one you wouldn’t use to describe a naughty child – a disturbed one, rather, who might need medical attention. Was it really the word he had meant to use? Roux looked me in the eye and said: ‘Yes.’

  Thankfully, most of Éric’s horseplay was ‘naughty’ rather than ‘caractériel’, and Roux noticed a marked improvement once the wrench of being parted from brothers, parents and grandparents was gradually blunted by the comradeship he developed with his new teammates. In that respect, Auxerre had been a wise choice, as no other elite club in France had a better claim to call itself ‘a family’. A husband-and-wife duo took care of the youth team at the time (Roux gave me their names, but omitting them might spare a few blushes, even now), a couple of ex-factory workers who looked after their meals, their kits and, sometimes, their sorrows. Once a week, Mrs X— left home after dinner to attend a late gym class in town. Mr X— did not waste much time in switching on the television and slipping an adult film into the video player. Word got round the academy of what was going on at the X—s’ home, and it became one of the week’s highlights to clamber over the dormitory walls and watch both Mr X— and watch what he was watching. What could Guy Roux do but smile?

  Smiles, however, were scarcer on the training ground. Roux loved skilled players, and stuck to the enterprising 4-3-3 formation which had taken his team to the top division in the country and to a French Cup final two years earlier, in 1979. But he could also be implacable with players who did not show the drive he never lacked himself. There are numerous stories of his ‘breaking’ young footballers who did not possess enough steel in their characters to withstand the toughness of Auxerre’s upbringing. Éric’s teammate Basile Boli, Guy Roux’s other ‘son’, could write in his remarkable autobiography Black Boli: Auxerre [was] a real factory. I’ve seen many kids whose dreams exploded like a football that’s been inflated too much. Formation is a gamble. When you win, you have a career. When you lose . . . you lose everything, really.’ Roux, who had been convinced of Éric’s talent ever since he had laid eyes on him, still waited for proof that the fifteen-year-old had the mental qualities required to put himself in contention for a place in the first-team squad. Both player and manager agree that this proof was shown late in the spring of 1982, shortly before the end of the season. Roux enjoyed pitting his reserves against the first team’s pros; nothing but pride was at stake, but it was proud men he was looking for, and a stupendous second half by the young Marseillais proved to him – and to everyone else – that, barely a year after he had left Provence, the prodigy of Les Caillols was ready to step up a level.

  There was no holding back Éric Cantona, in more wa
ys than one. On that sunny afternoon, the victim of his cheek was Lucien Denis, an experienced defender who, according to Roux, ‘went mad’. Incensed by the youngster’s dribbling, he fouled him crudely on several occasions. But if Denis was not amused, he was in a minority of one. ‘I could see he was already at the level of the pros – and he hadn’t celebrated his sixteenth birthday yet!’ Roux’s delight was shared by his apprentice. ‘Life was beautiful,’ Éric recalled in his 1993 autobiography, all the more so as his first season at Auxerre was to end with a magnificent opportunity to demonstrate his talent to a far larger audience than his club’s management team on a training pitch.

  An international friendly was to be played in Lyon between the France of Tigana, Giresse and Platini and Bulgaria on 15 May 1982, providing the national manager Michel Hidalgo with a last chance to deploy Les Bleus before the World Cup. As was the tradition at the time, the game would be preceded by a curtain-raiser, between the under-17s of France and Switzerland on this occasion. Éric played out of his skin. Everyone now knew that Guy Roux and his scouts had unearthed a gem, who signed off his first appearance for his country with the winning goal. The cadets of Auxerre also won the Coupe Gambardella – the French Youth Cup – that year, putting six goals past Nancy. ‘The kids we then had at the academy were of exceptional quality,’ says Roux. ‘Usually, out of a group of fifteen, if a third of them make it, you’ll be delighted. Well, out of this lot, twelve became pros, and four were capped by France at senior level: Basile Boli, Pascal Vahirua, William Prunier5 – and Cantona.’ Life was beautiful indeed.

  Still, nutmegging Lucien Denis in a seven-a-side game back at l’Abbé-Deschamps hadn’t given Éric a licence to queue-jump his way into the first team. He first had to further his education in the dour and unforgiving environment of the French third division, where upstarts of his kind are choice targets for the dirty tricks of so-called ‘hard men’ – and for the jealousy of teammates not quite good enough to be called from the reserves. Éric survived both tests with some ease, thanks to his irrepressible enthusiasm, his talent and his astonishing self-confidence, creating mayhem on the field of play as well as off it. The lightly built teenager of Marseilles was also turning into a stupendous athlete, and revelling in his physical transformation. The Ivorian-born defender Basile Boli, who had been turned away from Paris Saint-Germain, had arrived at Auxerre at the start of the 1982–83 season and, though seven months younger than Éric (according to his passport), had immediately joined him in the third division team. Both had the bodies of men several years their elder, and constantly looked for occasions to find out who was the quickest, the strongest, the most resilient. To Roux’s amazement, they were way ahead of everyone else in the reserves, and in every single department. A sprinter, held back by his weight and his muscular mass, would normally hit the wall when asked to complete more than a single lap of the track; not Basile, not Éric, who were both built like boxers rather than footballers of that day and age. A dancer needs powerful arms, shoulders and thighs (not to mention a torso like a lumberjack’s) as well as exceptional balance and coordination to perform his art; Cantona’s own brand of ballet should remind us of that truth: he was gifted the ideal body to become himself.

  The speed with which he had adapted to life in the reserves meant it was only a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ Guy Roux would give him his debut with the first team. Quite astonishingly, or perhaps characteristically, when asked by his amanuensis Pierre-Louis Basse to relive the occasion, Cantona would remember the date as 21 October 1984, against Nancy. He had got the opponents right – and the day wrong, by almost a year. In fact, it was on 5 November 1983 that he was at last given a chance to play alongside established internationals such as goalkeeper Joël Bats and striker Andrzej Szarmach, one of the heroes of Poland’s magnificent 1974 World Cup, where they were a whisker away from qualifying for the final (Éric had cried when Beckenbauer’s and Müllers West Germany made Cruyff’s Netherlands pay for the arrogance of their play). Auxerre waltzed past Nancy that day – and Cantona was ‘on a cloud’. ‘I knew little of Szarmach,’ he remembered, ‘but I was reassured by his simplicity, his kindness and his humility. I discovered what it meant to be a footballer of great talent, but also a man who had class.’ The Pole had done everything in his considerable power to offer a goal to the teenager, without success. Cantona’s own generosity to younger teammates, which was to have such an impact at Manchester United, was perhaps kindled on that day.

  Reports published at the time didn’t dwell on his contribution, however. He had done well, well enough to last over an hour; but he was not quite ready yet, nor was he when Roux called on him again for the visit of Lens six weeks later. Lens capitulated 4–0 at l’Abbé-Deschamps, just like Nancy had done, but he would have to wait until March 1985 to join the first-teamers again. Cantona had talent in spades, no question; but it was proving rather hard to bend this precious ore the way the manager would have wished. Cantona’s temper could short-circuit without warning, never more spectacularly than on one evening of this 1983–84 season. Here is how Roux retold the incident, with the same mixture of pride and concern he must have felt all those years ago.

  ‘We were playing against Cournon-Le Cendre on a Saturday night. These guys were tough. They came from a mining town of the Auvergne. One of their central defenders hacks him down, nastily. Éric gets up. The referee says nothing. Cantona is hacked again, and this time reacts. The other guy didn’t finish the game. His teammates were not happy. My assistant Daniel Rolland had already gathered our kit and left the ground, but I was still there, and so was Cantona, who hadn’t left the dressing-room. All the Cournon players are around me, next to the door. I asked them: “What are you waiting for?” “We’re waiting for Cantona.” “Well, listen, in any case, the evening will finish badly for you. If you give him a hiding, I’ll call the police and you’ll end up in a cell; but he might also give you a right thrashing, and you won’t be able to complain.” “There’s ten of us!” “You’ll see!” Then Canto gets out – he sees them – he doesn’t wait. He swings his bag around, and catches one of the guys on the head – out for the count – he punches a couple of others, throws the bag, and starts kicking them – yes, already! I can see a disaster about to happen. And what can I do? I wasn’t much at the time; but, instinctively, I scream “Halte!” at the top of my voice. Everybody stops. “Right,” I say, “enough. If there are any injuries, we go home and treat them.” We all troop back to the dressing-room. I get the first-aid kit . . . Éric had hurt his hands. But he sat with them as if nothing had happened! He was afraid of nothing.’

  Cantona was also mightily strong, as was proved when Roux took advantage of the long winter break to take his team to the crosscountry ski resort of Prémanon. Éric had by then achieved his transition to the senior level, at least in terms of sporting achievement; boarding with much older pros presented other challenges that he still wasn’t quite ready to confront. ‘But, once on the snow,’ adds Roux, ‘he was half an hour quicker than anyone else.’ The last day of their stay coincided with the French Youth Cross-Country Championships. The Auxerre staff asked the organizers to keep the tracks open and to put their medical facilities at their disposal. Roux then asked his players to take part in ‘our own little race, ten kilometres long, chocolate bars for the winner’. No prizes for guessing who pocketed the chocolate bars. Cantona ran out a clear winner, ‘by a mile’, ahead of Polish international Waldemar Matysik, whom his coach describes as ‘a very tough guy’. In fact, had Cantona taken part in the French Championships, his time would have placed him among the five quickest finishers. This is remarkable for a child of Provence who had never been on skis before.

  Week in, week out, Cantona had to measure himself against the mix of promising youths, convalescent first-teamers and professional journeymen who made up the vast majority of third division teams, many of which doubled up as reserve sides for the elite clubs. Auxerre was the exception; Auxerre was ab
out youth – all-conquering youth. Cantona and his friends took the title with some panache, his future brother-in-law Bernard Ferrer only being outscored by Éric himself, who finished the season with twenty goals to his credit, the last one ensuring AJA’s victory in the championship final. There were only 100 spectators in the Valence stadium to see what the correspondent of L’Yonne Républicaine described as a ‘stroke of genius’ from Cantona. The local paper was the only publication to report Auxerre’s 1–0 victory over the club that Éric might have joined had he not been asked to pay for one of their red-and-black striped shirts: OGC Nice. Cantona lost his marker, started a solitary raid from the halfway line, and scored. He also got a yellow card.