Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Houllier: ‘. . . and this is how Wilkinson signed Éric, following the recommendations of Michel and myself. Éric signed for Leeds – and became the champion of England.’

  So it was that, little more than a week after the initial meeting between Roach and Houllier, Howard Wilkinson sat down with Cantona in a Sheffield hotel room to discuss his future.

  Cantona himself was convinced that he had been hawked around to various English clubs (including a ‘very, very big one’ – possibly Liverpool, as Michel Platini had alerted Graeme Souness to Éric’s availability in November) without his knowledge or assent over the previous three weeks. Paranoia? Maybe not. Some clubs were willing to pay a ‘finder’s fee’ to agents who acted as mere go-betweens for players whom, strictly speaking, they had no legal right to represent. Cantona muttered that ‘two English guys’ (he later named one of them in an interview, which has evaded libel lawyers so far) had been ‘on the take’, but stopped short of revealing which clubs they had contacted. Wednesday agreed to pay a commission to Éric’s representatives in case a deal was agreed. So far, so good, except that Francis was apparently unaware that Cantona had been told that the ‘trial’ he would be subjected to was supposed to be a formality. This ultimately ruined any chance of Éric settling in Sheffield. Éric had every right to point out that it would have been very unlikely for an established England international to go through a trial before signing for a French club (a point of view which his future Leeds captain Gordon Strachan publicly endorsed shortly afterwards). So, on 31 January, the day before his planned debut for the Owls, one hour before training was supposed to start, a fax bearing Cantona’s signature arrived in Wednesday’s office. In it, Éric expressed his regret that things hadn’t worked out as hoped; but, in the present circumstances, he had no choice but to terminate the gentleman’s agreement between the club and himself.

  The news instantly filtered out of Hillsborough. It reached Manchester United, but too late (we’ll come to that later on): Leeds United were the quickest to react. The England under-21s manager Lawrie McMenemy had alerted Leeds manager Howard Wilkinson to the goings-on in Sheffield, and, on his way back from the training ground, ‘Sergeant Wilko’ drove the few miles that separated his home from the hotel where Éric was staying.

  Wilkinson’s mind wasn’t made up yet. Leeds had exceeded everyone’s expectations by rising to the very top of the championship with a little over a third of the season to go. But their manager doubted that his squad possessed the necessary depth to remain ahead of a fast-chasing pack over a full campaign. An extra weapon had to be added to the armoury. Could Cantona provide the answer for the almost stereo-typically English coach? Wilkinson telephoned Houllier, as we’ve seen, and also probed Michel Platini and Glenn Hoddle, who had seen Éric at close quarters over the three years he had spent in France, until a knee injury forced him to leave AS Monaco in December 1990. Wilkinson also sought the advice of a friend of his called Bobby Brown, for no apparent reason other than Brown’s wife happened to be French. The feedback he received was overwhelmingly positive. Despite the problems he had encountered in his previous clubs, Éric Cantona remained an exceptional player, they said. His dips in form could be explained by disagreements ‘which had resulted in him generally downing tools and walking out’, as Wilkinson told Rob Wightman twelve years later. Éric’s undeserved reputation for wilful instability preceded him, and his next manager didn’t try and look beyond it. He had already formed an opinion of Cantona’s strengths and weaknesses before he had had the chance to judge him on the training pitch, on the field of play or in the dressing-room.

  As some of those who served under him have told me, none more forcefully than Gary McAllister, Wilkinson genuinely tried to act fairly towards his players, Cantona included, but, in this instance, perhaps allowed himself to attach too much credence to hearsay. It was hard for anyone at that stage of Éric’s career to form a view of his character that was not tainted by prejudice, and Wilkinson, quite naturally, displayed a certain wariness towards the Frenchman from the outset of their delicate relationship. This wariness would later develop into mistrust, with disastrous results for the club.

  Nevertheless, as January 1992 came to a close, Wilkinson took a deep breath and bravely dived in. He arranged to meet Cantona through Jean-Jacques Bertrand. Éric occupied a spartan single room at the Swallow hotel, two miles away from Sheffield city centre. ‘His agent, Jean-Jacques, was sitting on the chair,’ Wilkinson recalled. ‘Éric was lying on the bed looking very dischuffed to say the least, with several days of growth on his face and looking as if the end of the world was nigh.’

  In some ways, it was. Cantona might have scored a paltry two goals in sixteen games for Nîmes, but he knew that his talent hadn’t waned; and just as he thought that Sheffield Wednesday might provide him with a springboard, the muddle-headed behaviour of the Yorkshire club’s board had precipitated yet another crisis. It was not just a matter of ‘Who will trust me? Where will I show I deserve to be trusted?’ but of ‘How will I pay the £1m I owe my former club?’ Wilkinson wasn’t just offering Éric the chance of a fresh start to his career, but also a way to keep the bailliffs at bay.

  Cantona’s customary bravado couldn’t hide his fear. Upon arriving in Sheffield, he had told France Football: ‘I give myself three years. Normally, I’d have five left [he was twenty-five at the time], but what I want is to play in the European Championships, to play them as well as I can, all together. If it works out well, [I want] to carry on with the World Cup in the United States, then basta. I’ll be twenty-eight years old. That’s another three years of my life, I’ll have sorted out all these problems, I’ll have tried to show the world what I am worth . . . If it works out fine, all the better; if not, at least I’ll have tried. Then I’ll go. But, this time, people will have had the time to prepare themselves for it.’ There was a hint of callousness in another comment, which must have hurt Isabelle deeply. ‘My parents, my family, my friends have found it very difficult to live through it,’ he acknowledged. ‘But me? Very easy.’

  He concluded: ‘I’ll play out these three years in England. I’ve got money. In three years, I’ll have even more. I will never play in France again, or anywhere else where a footballer’s life counts for nothing.’

  Cantona, Wilkinson and Bertrand spoke for over an hour in a mixture of broken English and schoolboy French. Éric himself remembered meeting ‘an ex-cep-tio-nal man, a grand monsieur’, which can be taken as an expression of gratitude as much as admiration – for Wilkinson was saving far more than his career by taking what he saw as ‘a huge gamble, the biggest of my life’.

  ‘Heaven knows, it’s difficult to be the fiend of a famous footballer.’ Heaven knows it must have been difficult to be a fiend of Éric Cantona. He gave many proof of the generosity of his character throughout his career, but found forgiveness a more elusive virtue, even when there was nothing to forgive, except a misunderstanding that, more often than not, had been caused by his own confused appraisal of circumstances. Why did he blank Didier Fèvre in Sheffield? Had he suddenly seen a photographer rather than a fiend? Had Fèvre become one of the seagulls following the trawler? Three years later, as he prepared to face the media following his appearance in an appeal court, Cantona noticed Erik Bielderman among a group of British tabloid writers at the back of the room. Of all the French journalists with whom Éric enjoyed a warm working relationship in Manchester, none had got closer to him than Bielderman. The reporter from L’Équipe (a staunch Manchester United fan) had gained Cantona’s trust when the two men had been involved in a heated exchange in which the journalist had refused to give ground to the football star. Mutual respect warmed into something resembling friendship. On several occasions (notably when Éric announced his retirement from Les Bleus in 1992, a comical episode we’ll come to in a later chapter), Cantona dropped unguarded remarks which, had they been printed in the next day’s paper, could have caused him a great deal of trouble. Bielderman knew whe
n to check himself and resist the pull of a scoop.

  Still, that afternoon in Croydon, after Éric had been punished by British justice, Bielderman ceased to be a confidant of his. Cantona’s eyes fell on the journalist, his face a living question (‘What are YOU doing here?’), to which Bielderman answered by lifting his eyebrows and shrugging his shoulders with a sigh (‘Well, I cannot be anywhere else, can I?’). And that was that. Their relationship had come to an end. Cantona, while remaining courteous when a perfunctory greeting had to be exchanged, never agreed to meet the journalist face to face again.

  I remember Bernard Morlino telling how a friend must behave as an accomplice when wrong has been done. I also remember Éric himself confessing to his admiration of those who ‘hold grudges’, because it is a proof of ‘character’. It’s hard to find much that is admirable in this conceit. What is the worth of the unquestioning loyalty of a dog who sits when he’s told to, and barks at a passer-by as if he were an enemy? Is subservience the acid test of affection between two human beings?

  In truth, however, if ‘heaven knows how difficult it is to be the friend of a famous footballer’, heaven knows too how difficult it must be for a famous footballer to single out a friend among the courtiers of celebrity. Of all the obstacles that are laid in the path of friendship, none is harder to pass over than the unequal distribution of wealth and the attraction of vicarious fame. Erik and I went through the names of footballers we had spent a significant deal of time with over the years, and could find only one who had managed to retain his openness to others absolutely intact despite living in an environment where paranoia is the rule: Robert Pires.

  Éric was no worse than the overwhelming majority of his fellow players in this regard. What made him stand apart was how he advanced through the stages of his life and his career by constantly stopping and starting again, as if breaking up with part of his past – a club, a friend – represented the only way to move forward, whether he had been the instigator of the breakup or not. He could always return to the womb of the family, the clan, if things turned awry. That at least could never change. His younger brother Joël could be relied upon when Éric craved absolute admiration. ‘If Canto stood there with a turd on his head, Joël would say he’s never seen anything so beautiful in all the world,’ as a one-time member of the closed circle told me, without irony. To Albert and Léonor, he remained their child. To others, an enigma.

  9

  A footballer’s home.

  A STRANGE KIND OF GLORY:

  LEEDS, 1992

  ‘Maybe I’ll play somewhere else in a year’s time. If, in a year’s time, I go somewhere else, then I’ll tell you: now, it’s there and nowhere else. Only cretins [cons] never change their minds.’

  Sheffield, January 1992

  Of all the clubs Cantona could have ended up with after the Sheffield Wednesday non sequitur, he found himself at Leeds United, the pantomime villains of English football who, twenty years earlier, under Don Revie, had nonetheless managed to produce some of the most glorious football ever played in the country. They had also antagonized every single fan of every other club with their blatant cynicism and carefully orchestrated gamesmanship. After eight years in the second division, Leeds had owed their reinstatement to the elite to the organizational skills of Howard Wilkinson, who had already led Sheffield Wednesday back to the first division in 1984 and succeeded Billy Bremner at Eiland Road in October 1988. The ‘Whites’ were then in real danger of sinking into the third tier of the English League for the first time in their history. His first decision was to take down the photographs of the Revie era from the clubhouse’s walls, ‘crutches’, he said, ‘for people who still basked in the reflected glory of those bygone days’. ‘Sergeant Wilko’ agreed with his predecessor Bremner’s judgement that ‘in football, yesterday happened a long time ago’, and immediately embarked upon the rebuilding of his squad. The new manager had a ‘nose’ for players, and showed it when he persuaded Manchester United’s goalscoring midfielder Gordon Strachan to join the ailing club. A shrewd assessor of talent, he could also call in ‘bruisers’ like Vinnie Jones, who were ideally suited to the rough-house action of a lower division. As soon as promotion had been gained, much more rapidly than anyone would have thought possible, Jones was sold, and Wilkinson brought in from Leicester City that purist’s dream, Gary McAllister. He could also take a bet on youth: David Batty and Gary Speed stepped out of the club’s academy in the 1990–91 season to complete a formidable midfield quartet that had few equals in the country. Leeds powered to fourth place in the championship.

  The days of the ‘closed shop’ and the ‘Big Four’ still lay a few years – an eternity, it seems – ahead, and other managers had achieved similar miracles in the recent past: Bobby Robson with Ipswich Town; Brian Clough, first with Derby County, then with Nottingham Forest; and Graham Taylor with Watford, albeit in a less pleasing style. What Wilkinson had done deserved praise nevertheless, not that many were willing to give it unless they read the Yorkshire Evening Post, and didn’t buy it in Sheffield. His team could certainly match any opposition in physical terms – David Batty never claimed to be a poet on the ball – but in the context of early 1990s English football, to dismiss Leeds as a collection of brutes intent on destruction would have been grossly unfair. True, they scored most of their goals with headers, long-distance strikes and through creating mayhem in the opposition’s box; but in Strachan, Speed and McAllister they also possessed footballers of genuine class and vision, not that anyone seemed to care outside Eiland Road, where supporters took a twisted kind of pleasure in their vilification. To them, Revie’s considerable success and the manner in which it had been achieved had never been celebrated as they should have been by a press in thrall to the teams Leeds fans most despised: Manchester United, of course, and London clubs such as elegant West Ham, glamorous Chelsea and classy Arsenal. This perceived injustice made them revel in their difference; they might as well give the others good reasons for hating them so. Cantona, the arch-maverick, the anti-hero par excellence, fitted perfectly with their vision of a world divided between ‘them’ and ‘us’; that he belonged in the second category soon became clear.

  The Yorkshire Evening Post informed its readers of Éric’s arrival at the club on 1 February, and, judging by the reactions of some of those readers, that particular edition might as well have been dated 1 April. But a few hours after the newspaper went on sale, Cantona was sitting in the stands at Eiland Road in person, watching his teammates put Luton to the sword 3–0. Leeds, who shared the top spot of the old first division with Manchester United at the time, but had played one game more, remained underdogs in the title race. The club’s fortunes had improved so quickly since winning the second division championship in 1989–90 that many supporters could not bring themselves to believe that Wilkinson’s thin squad could last the distance over forty-two games.

  The manager spoke of ‘the biggest gamble of his career’, but was he really taking such a huge risk? How many proven international strikers could you get for a down-payment of a mere £100,000? Nîmes and Cantona were only too happy to agree to a loan rather than a straight purchase, desperate as they were to extricate themselves from their current situation. Wilkinson – who had never seen the player in the flesh before signing him – had until 15 April to make up his mind, by which time there would only be four games to play in the league. Should he decide to close a permanent transfer deal, Leeds would have to disburse another £900,000. But only then. And Wilkinson was a shrewd gambler, who already had a fair idea of how and when he would play his trump card. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he told the local press, ‘[Éric] doesn’t have a reputation, because I don’t believe what I read in the papers.’ This was a slightly disingenuous statement, it must be said. As we’ve seen, Cantona’s new boss had sounded out a number of people before driving to meet Cantona in Sheffield, not just to be reassured about the player’s qualities (which all of Europe knew about), but also to es
tablish how much of his ‘reputation’ was based on fact. None of those he had approached had pretended that Éric’s behaviour had been a model of propriety. They had stressed, however, that when properly managed (that is, when his idiosyncrasies were not automatically construed as acts of rebellion), Cantona responded by repaying the trust put in him, sometimes beyond everyone else’s expectations.

  After a low-key presentation to the media, in which his interpreter had to keep a straight face when telling the journalists that ‘the problems I [Éric] have had have been little ones that have been exaggerated’, Cantona joined his teammates for his first practice match at Thorp Arch training ground, on 3 February. ‘It took Éric a matter of minutes to impress the players,’ Gary McAllister told me. ‘During the warm-up, we already saw a few strikes, a few volleys, and it was obvious this was a very special player.’ The Scottish midfielder sensed that Cantona could bring something that was lacking in an otherwise well-drilled and efficient unit: ‘a bit of flair, a bit of imagination – in other words, what you need to create space to play in and open gaps in defences’. Leeds possessed a terrific goalscorer in Lee Chapman (one of the best headers of a ball in the league), while Rod Wallace provided coruscating pace and penetration on the wing; but, full of guile and running as Wilkinson’s midfield was, it lacked a true fantasista and sometimes appeared devoid of solutions in the face of aggressive defending. David Batty played the role of anchorman, and tackled as if his life (and, sometimes, the life of the opposition players) depended on it. The twenty-two-year-old Gary Speed could be relied upon to ‘cover every blade of grass’ and pass the ball cleanly, without fuss, but not without skill. He could also strike the ball venomously with either foot. McAllister, the most elegant player in that superb quartet (which was complemented by ageing England international Steve Hodge), added threat in dead-ball situations and could alter the flow of play with the accuracy of his long passing. Last, Gordon Strachan, the club’s diminutive skipper who had won seven major honours with Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen in the early 1980s, provided the experience of over fifteen years in the professional game, plus cunning and boundless energy. Together with Chapman, these four men had taken Leeds to the top of the championship table; but, to remain there, they needed a footballer who could make the difference on his own.