Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  The worm hadn’t turned yet, though, and a hamstrung Jacquet watched his infuriatingly inconsistent team drop to 18th place in the league after a 2–0 defeat at Bordeaux, on 2 December. Paille had played fifteen inconsequential minutes for his new side, whereas Cantona had been at the heart of anything of note that had been shown by the Montpelliérains, as he was again a week later when, this time, Sport Club prevailed 2–0 against PSG, in a half-empty Stade de la Mosson, Éric scoring one of the two winning goals. The traditional winter break couldn’t come soon enough. The six weeks of hibernation French football had awarded itself that year would provide Nicollin with the time to sort out his shambolic club, which meant orchestrating Aimé Jacquet’s exit and replacement.

  Cantona, already the recipient of a meaningless championship winner’s medal with Marseille, finished the calendar year by missing out (but only just) on another trophy: the Prix Citron [lemon prize], which was awarded by the press to the football figure who had been the most difficult, uncooperative and downright unpleasant to work with or, in Éric’s case, without throughout the year. Bernard Tapie, always the favourite in that race, finished well ahead of him. The media had distinguished the duo who had provided them with more stories than anyone else, the difference between the two being that the OM chairman lived on publicity while his on-loan player had yet to learn how much he had to gain from it. England would teach him that.

  Éric’s holiday, which he spent in the USA, a country he had sometimes said he might settle in once he had retired from football, was a short one. Michel Platini asked him to join Les Bleus for a training break in Kuwait in mid-January, where a friendly had been arranged with the emirate’s national side. He looked sharp in France’s comfortable 1–0 victory, and did again three days later, on 24 January 1990, when he scored a double against the German Democratic Republic, who were brushed aside 3–0. Meanwhile, his Montpellier teammates had been recharging their batteries in the pleasant warmth of Algiers, and it was a transformed team which hosted Marseille when the league programme resumed on 4 February. The point they earned (the match finished 1–1) didn’t flatter them, and not much could be read into the 1–0 defeat they suffered at Monaco shortly afterwards: the club was bracing itself for the departure of a manager on whom they had pinned unrealistic hopes.

  The news broke on 13 February: as had been expected for several weeks, Jacquet and Montpellier had parted ways, without acrimony. The club’s troubles had been caused by a casting error, not by the lack of quality of those involved, and Nicollin was generous enough to blame himself for Montpellier’s disastrous first half of the season. But nobody could have predicted that the next four months would see an astonishing change in the Sport Club’s fortunes that would take them to the first major trophy in their history.

  It all started in low-key fashion. For once, Montpellier got lucky. Seven first division teams fell at the first hurdle in the Coupe de France, a competition that carries more prestige in my country than any other knockout cup in Europe, bar England and Scotland. Mézy’s men scraped through thanks to a goal scored in the last minute of additional time by the unsung Kader Ferhaoui. As the opposition consisted of lowly Istres, few took notice. But when Montpellier started stringing together a fine series of results in the championnat, conceding just the one defeat in close to two months, French football woke up to the idea that the aggregate of stars Nicollin had assembled in a rugby town was, at last, shaping into a cohesive whole. The Lemoult incident? A catalyst, perhaps, rather than a catastrophe. Too many games had been lost to make the championship more than an exercise in survival, but there was still a cup to be won, and Montpellier showed their resolve by blowing away an admittedly poor Louhans-Cuiseaux side, 5–1, on 10 March, featuring Éric’s only hat-trick for a French club at senior level. Cantona’s personal festival consisted of a technically perfect chest control-volley sequence, a looping header, and a slalom through the opposite defence, concluded with a screamer in the top of the net. Mézy subbed him with one minute to go, and the Stade de la Mosson rose to applaud the Marseillais. Éric was enjoying himself all the more now that Mézy had brought back Valderrama in the picture; indeed, Ferhaoui pointed out that ‘no one made Cantona catch fire like [the Colombian playmaker]’. France too benefited from Éric’s purple patch. Two-and-a-half weeks after the French Cup tie, Hungary succumbed 3–1 in Budapest: two more goals for Cantona, who repeated the feat in the next game, for his club this time, a 2–0 success over Sochaux. Nantes were brushed aside in the last 16 of the Cup (2–0 again), Lille massacred 5–0 in the league on 14 April, all but guaranteeing Montpellier’s safety, allowing Mézy and his men to concentrate on the Coupe de France.

  The magnificence of what La Paillade achieved that year, the emotions that it stirred, have not been forgotten in Montpellier. If the English have a genius for spotting the mythical dimension of failure – provided it is heroic, of course – the French like nothing better than a triumph borne out of despair. In the space of ten months, Cantona’s team brought an intoxicating cocktail of incompetence and inspiration to an ultimately successful resolution that one of Éric’s closest confidants described to me as ‘the encapsulation of his whole career, indeed, his whole life’. Montpellier – and this adds to the beauty of what they did – were by no means unbeatable; but every time questions were asked of their resilience, they won. On 2 May, Avignon, another lower-division side, fought like wild dogs at La Mosson before bowing out 1–0 in the Cup’s quarter-final. On the 24th of the same month, Éric’s 24th birthday, as it happens, St Étienne were beaten in the semis by the same margin, thanks to his 22nd goal of the season – quite a tally for a centre-forward who spent most of this campaign playing out of position.

  That evening, as Michel Mézy told me, not without some emotion, the entire squad went to a local restaurant to celebrate their qualification for their club’s first-ever final. Before coffee was served, Éric excused himself from the table. High on champagne and success, hardly anyone paid attention to his exit. ‘But he hadn’t gone to the bathroom,’ Mézy said. ‘He’d gone to pay for everybody else. That generosity, that’s Éric.’ This can’t be a coincidence: each time those who loved him have tried to explain to me why they did, they always ended up evoking the same trait in his personality – his willingness to please, his delight in giving.

  The final itself was a blur. Montpellier, playing without the suspended Valderrama, prevailed against Racing 2–1 in extra time, with all three goals scored between the 103rd and 109th minutes, with another of Ferhaoui’s last-gasp efforts to settle the tie. Isabelle couldn’t be there, so Didier Fèvre became Éric’s ‘wife’ (his word) for a night nobody wished to end. Nicollin wined and dined everyone involved with the club on the Champs-Elysées. At 5 a.m., Didier snapped the last men standing: Loulou, Lolo (Blanc) and Canto, fighting to stand upright on the empty avenue. Please, let this moment last for ever. The party went on for three days: in Paris, back in Montpellier, in private, with the fans or in front of television cameras. Mézy: ‘Canto made me cry. If, tomorrow, he is on the other side of the world and he has a problem, I’ll go there. If he’s sleeping in the street and knocks on my door, I’ll open it. If there’s nothing to eat, we’ll share anyway.’ What had he done that others hadn’t? ‘I listened to him. To know someone, you first must listen to that person. It’s even easier with Éric: he’s intelligent. By the end of the season, everyone loved him.’

  The euphoria didn’t last long. Within a few days, Mézy had left, to take care of the club he had always loved: Nîmes. Éric – who had known for a while that his friend was bound to go – would join him there him a year later, answering the call of friendship. But, for now, he was still a Marseille player. Bound by his contract, Cantona returned to OM, and to Bernard Tapie.

  One man had particular reason to delight in Cantona’s renaissance: Michel Platini. He had always stood by the renegade, one of the few men within the game’s establishment to believe that a special talent like Canton
a’s warranted special treatment. More than that, as his then assistant Gérard Houllier told me, ‘Michel adored Éric,’ stressing the word ‘adored’ to make sure I understood that Platini’s regard extended to the man as well as the player. The young French manager called Cantona ‘a purist who looks for le beau geste as a priority’, adding a caveat which conveyed not fiustration, but a deep desire to see Cantona fulfil his immense promise: ‘the beau geste must be accompanied by efficiency. I think that Cantona doesn’t use his physical qualities enough for a striker. And he has them! That said, he’s improving steadily.’

  To Éric, the ideal manager should act as a surrogate father. Roux and Ferguson were avatars of Albert; Platini, the exception, of Jean-Marie Cantona. ‘Michel acted towards me as . . . a big brother,’ Éric said in 1991. ‘If he gets the results he gets for the national team [France was in the middle of a record undefeated streak at the time], it is because he loves us, he loves the way we play, but, more than everything, he loves us for what we are.’ The ‘us’ stood for ‘me’, of course. In the last few months of his stay at Montpellier, at ease with himself and his young family, at ease with his teammates, confident in his club’s and national manager’s ability to see beyond his occasional lapses into indiscipline, Éric could express another facet of his talent: his generosity. He revelled in the pleasure he was giving others.

  Pleasure: what football was about, whether you were kicking a crumpled newspaper in your bedroom, juggling cans in the street, or having tens of thousands of people rise in unison when a backheel fell into the path of a teammate in full flow, with the unexpected delight of a perfectly placed ‘wrong’ note in a melody. Pleasure went hand in hand with simplicity and, together, conjured something like le bonheur, a word I’ve always felt inadequate when translated into mere ‘happiness’, as bonheur conveys a sense of absoluteness (and physical joy) I can find no equivalent of in English. April, May, June, not a single defeat: le bonheur. Men playing like boys, egging each other on to greater things, remembering why they chose, or were chosen, to make others revive memories of their own youth. A trick of the imagination, a deceiving trap set by the inadequacies of age? Who cares? At the heart of every football supporter, and every football player, lies this conviction that, if only for a moment, a game can transport us all to Arcadia. Some will dismiss this as mere gesturing, baseless romanticism and, far worse, sentimentality. Éric strove to prove them wrong, and there lies his greatness. He could perceive the essential difference between a win and a conquest. He was given the talent to demonstrate it on a football pitch and he used it, out of personal necessity. The rest, the self-serving aggrandizement, the lapses into violence, the arrogance (not the insolence), came to the surface when he felt thwarted, and only then. ‘Maybe, on the day I caressed a ball for the first time,’ Éric said, ‘the sun was shining, people were happy, and it made me feel like playing football. All my life, I’ll try to capture that moment again.’ That year, he did better than that: he caught the sun and offered it to others.

  7

  With Raphaël in his pram, after the Lemoult incident.

  THE VAGABOND 3:

  MARSEILLES, AGAIN, AND NÎMES

  ‘Tapie is a great manipulator. He’s one of these people who really make me despair that any bond [can exist] between myself and a country I love: France. But it’s not just him. All the politicians, all these people who make me hate a country that deserves to be adored.’

  Sunday 21 February 1993, Worsley. Éric was sitting in the lounge of the Novotel which had become his second home in Manchester, a bottle of lager and a bowl of nuts by his side. Facing him was the football-mad poet and essayist Bernard Morlino, who, a few days previously, had caught his attention at the end of a press conference by asking the most improbable of questions. ‘Do you believe it is possible to succeed in the century of Buchenwald and Drancy?’ It took some beating as an ice-breaker, it must be said. But it worked. ‘We’ll talk about it, next time, maybe,’ Cantona answered. Morlino pushed his advantage further. ‘You are the nightingale [singing] on the barbed wire . . .’ Éric proposed to meet face to face with Morlino a week later. And when the time came for the two men to see each other again, it was Éric’s turn to spring a surprise on his questioner.

  ‘If I had four hours left to live,’ he said, ‘I’d jump on a plane and put a bullet in X—’s head.’

  When Morlino recounted the anecdote in Manchester Memories, a book I’ve already mentioned and will mention again, he took the precaution of leaving out the name of Cantona’s target. He had understood Éric’s confession as a test of his own integrity. Could he keep a secret, or would he rather ruin a nascent relationship for the sake of a scoop – which Cantona could always deny? Perhaps – but only perhaps. In any case, when Morlino published the story, seven years later, he added a clue that made serious dents in X—’s anonymity. That individual ‘used to write on the dressing-room’s blackboard: “injection for everyone”’. No one denies that injections were routinely administered to Marseille players throughout the Tapie era. But of what? ‘Vitamins’, as was claimed by the medical staff? Or performance-boosting drugs? In Cantona’s mind, obviously the latter. The belated ‘revelations’ of a footballer called Jean-Jacques Eydelie15 gave credence to a point of view almost everyone within French football – players, managers (like Arsène Wenger), journalists and supporters – shared with Éric. Now, who at OM would have wielded enough power to impose injections on the players? Éric had three managers at the club. Gérard Gili? No. They may not have seen eye-to-eye on everything, but always spoke of each other with respect. Franz Beckenbauer? Most unlikely; the Kaiser appreciated Éric, who appreciated him in return. Raymond Goethals? The so-called Belgian Sorcerer’s reputation could not be described as virginal, and, as we’ll see, it was he who prevented Éric from playing in a European Cup final. But if Goethals is one of our two possibilities, the other is Bernard Tapie, whose control of everything related to OM verged on the absolute. Towards the end of his stay at Leeds, in the autumn of 1992, Cantona told Erik Bielderman that it was a good idea to bring one’s own orange juice to Marseille’s training ground. A France Football reporter heard a similar story: At Marseille, it’s better to come with your own cook, your own grub, your own drinks. But that’s not all . . . it’s better too if your chairman [Tapie] gives you a big bonus. That prevents you from taking money elsewhere . . .’ Could he be clearer?

  Yet when Tapie insisted that Cantona return to the Vélodrome for the start of the 1990–91 season, Éric complied without fuss. Another of my France Football colleagues, Laurent Moisset, caught up with him in mid-June, in the Pyrenees ski resort of Font-Romeu, where it was and is customary for the French national squad to gather for off-season physical conditioning. Cantona sounded thrilled at the prospect of rejoining ‘the best club in France, the only one that corresponds to my ambitions’. It helped that since his forced errands to Bordeaux and Montpellier, OM had recruited a number of southern-born players who shared Éric’s Mediterranean roots – and his passion for hunting: Bernard Casoni, freshly arrived from neighbouring Toulon; Bernard Pardo, who had just disembarked from Bordeaux; and the superbly gifted but mercurial ’keeper Pascal Olmeta, formerly with ill-fated Matra Racing, whom he had met with the Espoirs and who had been a friend for a number of years already. Olmeta, who hailed from Corsica, invited Éric to his native island on several occasions – which may be why Cantona is sometimes referred to as a Corsican himself.

  The newly formed gang brought in another pure Marseillais, Éric DiMeco, to purchase a share in a large shooting syndicate in the Var département. ‘It was true sport,’ Pardo remembered, ‘because Éric, purist as he is, refused to shoot game that had been “lâché” – that is, semi-tame, and freed from cages on the eve of the party.’ (‘I hunt for the beauty of the hunt,’ Éric would say in his very first interview in England. ‘I don’t like killing for the sake of it. I kill only when there is beauty in it, otherwise it’s butchery. Hunting, lik
e painting, is an art.’)

  ‘On the opening day of the shooting season,’ Pardo continued, ‘[Éric] arrived on a Harley-Davidson, with a gun slung over one shoulder. The old guys from the area thought they were hallucinating.’

  The crowd at the Vélodrome was not as nonplussed as the ‘old guys’ of the Var had been, but the very sight of Cantona in an OM shirt was, in many ways, even more surprising. Many Marseillais thought they had seen the last of Éric as one of their own almost two years previously, on 17 December 1988, when he hadn’t done much in a 2–0 victory over St Étienne. Only a few days before the season started – on 21 July – the talk in the bars around the Vieux-Port was of OM dispatching Cantona to AS Cannes on yet another loan. The rumours had no other basis than Tapie’s close relationship with that club’s chairman, Michel Moillot – and the Phocéens refusal to believe that Éric and Nanard had agreed on a truce. But come the first day of the new campaign, Cantona lined up with his teammates on the pitch of the Vélodrome.

  Was it the desire to finally prove himself in the city of his birth, the presence of like-minded friends, or simply the maturing of an exceptional talent? Cantona started the season in dazzling fashion. ‘Who doesn’t make mistakes?’ he said. ‘It happened to me, as it’s happened to everyone. But I learnt my lesson, and I never make the same mistake twice.’ And, for a while, it seemed as if a new player had, indeed, come back from Montpellier; a new man, too. ‘I feel a desire to settle down somewhere,’ Éric told Moisset. ‘For good, and for a long time. Let’s say I’ve had enough of packing my case every season.’ So had Isabelle, who now had a child to look after and had tired of having to stuff the young family’s possessions into cardboard boxes every six months or so.