Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Inspired by a splendid Cantona, Marseille opened the defence of their title with three consecutive victories: Nice were beaten 1–0, Metz vanquished 2–0 away from home, Caen edged 2–1 in a hard-fought game in which the team’s eventual success was overshadowed by the Vélodrome’s reaction to Éric’s display. After he had scored the second of his two goals, both of them created by another future outcast of the Goethals regime, Dragan Stojkovi, a small section of the crowd started chanting his name. The whole arena soon joined in. A beaming Cantona shared his joy with the press afterwards. ‘A game like this does a lot of good,’ he said, ‘especially now. I was happy to give pleasure to the crowd, I wanted to give them pleasure.’ How could he explain this transformation? ‘I find my place more easily in this team. It’s good to feel the ball closer to you, to have a closer relationship with it . . . It’s a bit like with women.’

  Those who shared his life on the training ground spoke of a hardworking, dedicated professional with no airs and graces about him, and of their delight to see that, in Bernard Pardo’s words, ‘people realize that he’s a man like any other, while remining a special player’. He had to be to earn a spot in Gili’s starting eleven, given the richness of OM’s attacking options at the time. The ‘golden boot’ Jean-Pierre Papin could be assured of his place as the leader of the strike force. The Ghanaian Abedi Pelé provided an explosive option on either flank, while Chris Waddle was reminding OM supporters (who nicknamed him ‘Magic’) of the great Roger Magnusson’s gift for evading defenders at will. Philippe Vercruysse, the most naturally talented of a batch of ‘new Platinis’ who emerged in the late 1980s, vied for the role of regista with the newly arrived Stojkovi. Cantona’s sparkling form, however, made him a fulcrum of the side, one of Gili’s ‘untouchables’, together with Papin and Waddle.

  The credit for this all too brief blossoming is universally, and wrongly, given to Franz Beckenbauer, who had left his position at the head of the German national team shortly after the Mannschaft had won their third World Cup in July. The Kaiser had joined the staff of Adidas (then owned by Tapie) almost immediately after celebrating victory in the Mondiale, and it seemed only a matter of time before his rather obscure role in that company led to an appointment at the helm of Marseille, despite the chairman’s assurances to the contrary. But Gili, the ‘dead man walking’, remained in charge for two months, and it is with him and for him that Éric produced his best-ever spell at a French club, and almost convinced the fickle OM supporters that they had wronged the man who talked of them as ‘brothers’. The statistics bear this out. Cantona played nine games for Gili, seven for Beckenbauer, scoring five goals for the unglamorous Frenchman, three for the impossibly debonair Bavarian. But, not for the last time, fiction would be accepted as truth, and Gili’s faith in the player who had thrown his shirt at him that night in Sedan would be forgotten to make place for a more dramatic story: how one of the greatest defenders the world has ever seen formed an unlikely alliance with the ‘bad boy’ of French football and nearly rescued him, only to be torpedoed by the scheming of their powerful paymaster. That both of them were victims of Tapie’s inconsistency, lack of nerve or impatience (all three descriptions are equally valid) cannot be denied. But luck, or the lack of it, played a far greater part in Éric’s undeserved ostracism than is commonly admitted, and the prospect of playing for a legend of the game had little or no impact on the quality of his performances.

  Up until 25 August (by which time OM led the league championship, ahead of Brest and Arsène Wenger’s Monaco), when he missed a 1–1 draw at Nantes because of a slight injury, Cantona had played every single minute of every single game Marseille had been involved in. Nothing could stop him, not even the fires which ravaged the garrigue around Aubagne and Cassis towards the end of the month, and forced his family to be evacuated. Gili’s day of reckoning was approaching with depressing predictability (Tapie now described Beckenbauer as his ‘assistant’), but his squad held firm, and remained unbeaten. Lille were defeated 2–0, a scoreline repeated in the next league match, against Bordeaux, in which Papin scored the goals but Éric stole the show with an incredible shot from fully 50 yards, which rebounded off Joseph-Antoine Bell’s crossbar – an even better version of the lob which he attempted in a later Chelsea-Manchester United FA Cup game, and which prompted BBC commentator John Motson to ask: ‘Who needs Pelé?’ In Marseilles, the question might well have been: ‘Who needs Beckenbauer?’ Three points (wins were worth two points then) now separated OM from their closest rivals, FC Brest.

  Cantona’s league campaign was interrupted by a trip to Iceland with the national side at the beginning of September, which is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, France made heavy weather of winning their first game of the Euro 1992 qualifying campaign 2–1 (Éric scored the decisive goal with a header from a corner kick). Second, with a quarter of an hour to play, Platini decided to protect Les Bleus two-goal advantage and replaced Cantona with his old warhorse, defensive midfielder Luis Fernandez. Gérard Houllier witnessed what followed the substitution. ‘Éric went to the dressing-room, seething with rage,’ he told me. ‘Michel [Platini] goes there too. And we hear this almighty noise coming from below . . . White as a sheet, Michel comes back and tells me: “Gérard, I’ll never, ever take him off the pitch again!”’ True to his word, he never did.

  While Éric was away on international duty, Beckenbauer was officially promoted to the rank of OM’s technical director on 6 September. Still, the squad, the supporters (and many journalists) couldn’t bring themselves to believe that Gili’s tenure could be cut short when his team were playing with such spirit, verve and authority. PSG were the next visitors to fall at the Vélodrome (2–1), Cantona finding the target again. He celebrated the win by joining Olmeta and Pardo at dawn for a shooting trip in the Provençal hinterland, the three friends seemingly oblivious to the manoeuvring taking place in their chairman’s office. Gili himself knew the writing was on the wall, though, and when his players brought back another success from Toulouse (2–0, on 14 September), he described it with a heavy heart as ‘my last victory’ to the media. That was not quite true: he survived long enough to see Marseille crush Dinamo Tirana 5–1 in the European Cup five days later, Éric finding the target for the seventh time since August. But within twenty-four hours, Gili’s departure was confirmed in a club statement.

  Beckenbauer inherited one of the strongest squads in Europe, a still united dressing-room, and a group of players at the top of their form. But Tapie had underestimated the extent to which Gili’s death by a thousand cuts could affect the morale of the championship leaders. On the day the Kaiser first sat in the OM dugout, Cannes stunned the Vélodrome by inflicting a 1–0 defeat on the title-holders, their first of the 1990–91 season in any competition. Predictably enough, this was viewed as just retribution for the manner in which the club’s previous coach had been ousted. But as so often in a situation of crisis – as he had done at Auxerre when their European aspirations were in danger, at Montpellier when his closest friend left him alone on the deck of a sinking ship, and as he would do time and again for Manchester United – Éric found new resources of willpower, and took it on himself to change the course of events. Chris Waddle is one of many to insist on the cordiality of Cantona’s relationship with Beckenbauer. ‘Cantona enjoyed training with him,’ he told L’Équipe Magazine in 2007, ‘and Beckenbauer was a big fan of his. We played Éric and JPP upfront, with me behind them or on the right-hand side and someone on the left. Beckenbauer liked him to get in the box a lot. He used him more as an English centre-forward, to get him to try and come in at the far post, to use his head and his height.’

  The performance level of many Marseille players had suffered from the messy goings-on in the upper reaches of the club, but not Cantona’s. After a fine display in a 3–1 victory at Monaco – one of OM’s most dangerous rivals in the championnat – Éric played a stupendous game against St Étienne at the Vélodrome, adding two goals to his
tally, which made him the fifth most efficient marksman in the league at the beginning of October. His new coach could not praise him enough: ‘for me, Cantona-Papin is even better than Völler-Klinsmann, because they’re a partnership that can better adapt to circumstances’ – a partnership that shone again when France disposed of Czechoslovakia 2–1 in a Euro 92 qualifier in mid-October. Platini’s France hadn’t been beaten in nearly two years, and owed this record in large part to Éric’s sustained excellence.

  But three games later, disaster struck when Marseille played against Brest on the 28 October. OM needed to react after a 2–1 defeat at Sochaux and did so; in fact, they were cruising. Pascal Olmeta told me of an Éric who was then ‘at the top of his game’ and managed to put aside his disenchantment with the club when he had the ball at his feet. Cantona had opened the scoring with a header that afternoon, in front of a beaming Beckenbauer who was at last watching a performance worthy of his squad’s reputation. But just before half-time, the Cameroonian midfielder Racine Kané launched himself in a wild tackle from behind which left Éric writhing with pain on the turf. He had torn the cruciate ligaments of his right knee. With Stojkovi, Vercruysse and Abedi Pelé already long-term absentees because of injury, OM had lost the last of its playmakers, and the glow of a 3–1 victory soon faded away. The wobble which had followed the German manager’s appointment snowballed into a real crisis. Marseille fell 3–2 against Lech Poznan in the European Cup (a result they would cancel out in the return leg at the Vélodrome), then conceded a humiliating defeat to Nancy in the championship, which enabled Cantona’s first club, Auxerre, to overtake them at the top of the league. But results only told part of a far bigger story.

  Almost every day, it seems, France was waking up to the news of another football scandal. The Girondins of Bordeaux had been found to have a black hole of FF242m (£24m) in their accounts. The ‘great treasurer of French football’, Jean-Claude Darmon, was accused of having used phantom companies to siphon money out of both Toulon and Matra Racing. The ensuing investigation cleared him of any wrongdoing in the affair, but football’s reputation within French society, which wasn’t lofty to start with, sank a little bit deeper. Marseille hadn’t yet been sucked into this quagmire of suspicion and financial irregularities, despite the rumours which surrounded the club; but this changed at the end of November, when a photocopy of Jean-Pierre Papin’s contract was leaked to the press. It had long been suspected that OM used an undeclared slush fund to pay sweeteners of all kinds. Whilst the document which had just come to light – bearing the signatures of the player and of the club’s then technical director Michel Hidalgo – did not provide conclusive proof of its existence, it nonetheless revealed serious irregularities in OM’s accounting. JPP had been granted an interest-free loan of FF1m (about £100,000) in February 1988, ‘to help him realize personal investments’. Compared to what Bez had done, of course, this was mere child’s play. But everyone surmised that only the very tip of the iceberg had emerged. Previous OM bosses had unfortunately been susceptible to brokering ‘arrangements’ of that kind long before Tapie had taken control of the club: in 1972, Marseille’s inspirational chairman Marcel Leclerc’s downfall in a boardroom coup (dubbed ‘The Night of the Long Knives’) had been brought on by his use of OM’s financial resources to prop up his media investments. In Cantona’s eyes, though, the arrival of Tapie turned what the player called a ‘culture of cheating’ from an unsavoury trait of Marseille’s character into a modus operandi, a superficial flaw into a full-blown disease which poisoned every nook and cranny of the club’s management structure.

  When I asked Olmeta how Cantona, who had been magnificent until his injury, could be first sidelined, then ostracized as he was in the second half of the season, he was quick to point out that football had little to do with it. ‘Only three people dared tell Tapie what they thought of him,’ he said. ‘Éric, [Bernard] Pardo and myself. Éric told him he was an enculé [motherfucker] in front of the others. And that was that.’ Cantona was disgusted by what he could see happening around him, and appalled by what he felt was the lack of courage of the great majority of his teammates, some of whom theatened to go on strike when their beloved chairman was threatened with disciplinary action after abusing a referee. The ‘band of brothers’ Éric had found at his return from Montpellier became a fractious dressing-room, and ‘that’s what really got to him’, Olmeta recalled. ‘Nobody had the balls to say merde to Tapie, and when you shit on Canto’s head, he’ll never forget it as long as you’re alive.’

  Another man had the ‘balls’ to stand his ground: Franz Beckenbauer, whom Cantona admired for his ‘German rectitude’ and his refusal to condone what Éric called ‘southern dilettantism’ – by barring hangers-on from the dressing-room, for example, which didn’t go down too well with local journalists who had enjoyed ‘access all areas’ status for as long as anyone could remember. A World Cup-winning coach is unlikely to listen to the tactical advice of a failed pop singer, and when Tapie attempted to give a half-time pep talk to his players towards the end of the year, the Kaiser reminded his chairman who was in charge of the team. ‘I’m the boss,’ he said in front of an admiring Olmeta; but he wasn’t for long. Many were of the opinion that Beckenbauer’s fate was decided the minute he dared put Tapie in his place. In December 1990, speaking to the German press agency DPA, the manager had already admitted to ‘differences of opinion between’ his chairman and himself, and complained about ‘the excessive outside influences on the players’. ‘I’ll meet Mr Tapie after Christmas,’ he said. ‘Either it’ll all be over in five minutes, or we’ll come to an arrangement.’ A few weeks later, in January 1991, the arrangement had been found. The German World Cup winner was appointed ‘director of the technical staff’, a first step towards the door leading him out of Marseilles, and the team’s future had been entrusted to a new coach, the third in a season that was just five months old: Raymond Goethals, whom Éric knew a lot about, as it was he who had made life a misery for Stéphane Paille at Bordeaux the previous year.

  Goethals, the man who would effectively cut short Éric’s career at Marseille, certainly didn’t project the image of sophistication Beckenbauer was so keen for others to perceive. Garrulous, fond of outrageous metaphors, speaking with a thick accent that (depending on your outlook on what constitutes humour) accentuated your amusement or your embarrassment, the Belgian Sorcerer was a throwback to older, and not necessarily more innocent, times. He eked a decent career as a goalkeeper in the 1940s and 1950s for two of Brussels’ lesser-known sides, Daring Club and Racing, before establishing himself as one of his country’s most successful managers, guiding the national team to the 1970 World Cup finals and a superb third place in the 1972 European championships. Moving to Anderlecht, his three-year tenure there was highlighted by two European Cup Winners Cup finals, the second of which was emphatically won 4–0 against Austria Wien, in 1978. Having proved his worth, Goethals thought the time had come to be properly rewarded for it. He embarked on a peripatetic career that saw him look after Bordeaux (for one season only, in 1979–80) and, even more briefly, Sao Paulo, before taking over the venerable Standard Liège in 1981. He led them to another Cup Winners Cup final, narrowly losing 2–1 to Barcelona.

  As a coach, Goethals had pedigree. He also had what police officers call ‘previous’. He had to leave Liège in a hurry in 1984 when it was reported that the players of modest Thor Waterschei had been offered money to ‘take it easy’ in a league game played two years beforehand. Goethals was accused of having used his own captain, the fearsome Éric Gerets, as a go-between (at the time of writing, the same Gerets had just left his managerial post at Olympique de Marseille, of all clubs), and was banned from coaching in Belgium ‘for life’. Goethals fled to Portugal, where Vitória Sport Clube Guimarães were happy to offer him a managerial position, which he kept for a year only, when the Belgian FA controversially pardoned Goethals and allowed him to go back to his native country. Amazingly, Standard we
re never stripped of their 1982–83 title. A couple of years with the tiny Brussels club Racing Jet, another two with, again, Anderlecht, and Raymond-la-science (a popular nickname in the underworld, which OM fans bestowed upon him almost instantly) was on his way again, to Bordeaux, at which point his eccentric trajectory joined that of Cantona.

  This preamble is not gratuitous. If two men were ever born who were fated never to understand each other, it must have been Goethals and Cantona. ‘The Belgian’ (which is how Éric refers to him in his autobiography, where it doesn’t come across as a complimentary or even informative epithet) changed clubs at the drop of a hat to serve his own, very material interests. Éric followed his instinct, with scant regard for the consequences. Goethals valued – le mot juste – victory so much that he was apparently prepared to buy it. Éric hated losing to such a degree that he would rather fail than admit that defeat was a possibility. The manager didn’t rate the player (‘he’s not a modern striker’); the player despised the manager who put him on the bench. This, for Cantona, was the darkest hour.

  The season had started well for him. Seven goals in twelve games. The Vélodrome chanting his name, at long last. Then Racine Kané launched into his tackle, ripping Éric’s knee ligaments, Beckenbauer was gone, and by the time Cantona was fit again, Goethals had implemented a tactical system in which his striker’s opportunities would be severely restricted. It would serve Marseille well, however, as two European Cup finals, one of them victorious, testify. Papin operated as a lone centre-forward, with Chris Waddle and Abedi Pelé jinking this way and that to attract defenders and create space for the dynamic striker. Both the Englishman and the Ghanaian were in magnificent form that season, providing JPP with chance after chance, which he gleefully buried. Did OM need Cantona? Not according to Goethals.