Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Leeds’ opponents in the second round of the European Cup were Rangers. The Scottish champions were a far more formidable force then than today, as they would prove by remaining unbeaten in the competition and missing qualification for that year’s final by a single point (Marseille pipped them to the post in the tournament’s second phase). Whoever prevailed in this two-legged encounter would earn a coveted spot in the so-called ‘group phase’, a mini-league in which the eight survivors slugged it out in pools of four teams each. A club’s mere presence in one of these two pools guaranteed millions of pounds of income in gate receipts and sales of broadcasting rights.

  Wilkinson knew by then that winning the inaugural Premier League title was an unattainable ambition. But provided his team could ensure safety in the first tier of English football, the huge revenue derived from Europe’s top club competition could give him the means to rebuild his squad for a fresh assault on the championship a year hence. Leeds first had to win what every single newspaper in the country, north and south of the border, dubbed ‘The Battle of Britain’. Rarely was the use of a clichéd headline more strikingly vindicated than on this occasion.

  The tone of the clash was given by the decision to bar away fans from both legs of the tie. Anglo-Scottish confrontations had been marred by crowd violence since the 1960s, and the regular outbreaks of hooliganism that accompanied fixtures of that type had contributed to the abandonment of the British Home Championship at the end of the 1983–84 season. The Heysel tragedy and the subsequent ban inflicted on England’s clubs had prevented sides from the two countries from facing each other since 1985. Judging by the sheer brutality of what ensued, the ban had been no bad thing.

  Unfortunately for Éric, thuggish behaviour did not stop on the touchline. The Ibrox ‘walls of hate’ enclosed what could almost be called a killing field, if the victim were football as Cantona wished to play it. Gary McAllister – a native of Motherwell with a broader outlook on life than sectarian Glaswegians – has vivid memories of those two European nights. ‘The Rangers players knew Éric very, very well,’ he told me with a knowing smile. ‘They gave him some . . . special attention. Their centre-backs were very physical with Éric in both games . . . Éric is a strong guy and can look after himself, but he did get some proper treatment those nights.’ Delicately put; Cantona was kicked off the park.

  Wilkinson, no shrinking violet himself, had an inkling of what was in store for his Frenchman. It started well for Leeds – too well maybe. Two minutes were on the clock when McAllister unleashed a superb volley that was greeted by what I can only describe as an explosion of silence. Then the crowd’s roar rose again around the stands like goosebumps. The Leeds ’keeper John Lukic was forced to punch a corner kick into his own net, and obliged. Ally McCoist then doubled Rangers’ tally with a typically opportunistic goal from close range, leaving the visitors with the task of scoring once without reply at home to go through.

  Most observers thought that, once they had emerged from the cauldron of Ibrox, Leeds could summon the coolness required to do just that, but Mark Hateley had other ideas. As in Glasgow, two minutes had elapsed when the first goal was scored; this time, though, it was an Englishman playing for a Scottish club who struck, not vice versa. When Hateley pierced the Leeds defence on the left to provide a perfect cross for McCoist to head into the net, the hosts found themselves three goals in arrears, needing to score four themselves to avoid going out of the competition. Leeds responded by hurling balls in the direction of Chapman and Cantona with predictable results. They laid siege to the Rangers goal, in which Andy Goram was having one of the best nights of his life. It was like lobbing oranges at a wall. Éric managed to reduce the deficit after a scramble in the penalty box, but far too late to save his side. Rangers won 4–2 on aggregate, and Wilkinson’s plans lay in ruins.

  English football hadn’t known many darker days in Europe. While Leeds were vanquished in the ‘Battle of Britain’, Liverpool were dumped out of the Cup Winners Cup by Spartak Moscow, losing 2–0 at Anfield, while Sheffield Wednesday’s first European venture (in the UEFA Cup) ended with a 3–5 defeat on aggregate against Kaiserslautern. England still played in the shadow of Heysel.

  The scene now shifts forward sixteen years. I am sitting with Gérard Houllier in a plush Neuilly restaurant which seems to cater only for a clientele of impossibly well-connected businessmen, Paris Saint-Germain footballers and cosmetically enhanced beauties. We’ll be joined by one of Arsène Wenger’s advisers later on, but for the time being, France’s present national technical director is talking about Éric Cantona with some passion. We’ve now reached a pivotal point in Houllier’s narrative. Gérard had made the trip to Glasgow to assess the striker he hoped to deploy when Finland visited le Parc four weeks later, on 14 November, and flew to Leeds for the return leg. Shortly before that game, Howard Wilkinson invited him to watch a video cassette in his hotel room. The Leeds manager inserted the tape in the VCR, adding three words: ‘Look at Éric.’ It was a recording of Cantona’s reaction to being substituted at Ibrox. He’d made straight for the dressing-room.

  Houllier was at pains to explain that such behaviour was commonplace (if not the norm) in France, and that Wilkinson shouldn’t take Éric’s silent exit as a snub directed at his coach. But ‘Howard saw it as a mark of disrespect towards the other players, and I could feel there was some tension between the two’. It so happened that when the substitution took place, Gérard was sitting between Andy Roxburgh (then manager of Scotland and technical director of the Scottish FA) and Alex Ferguson, whom he’d known since 1986. ‘I turned to Alex,’ Houllier recalled, ‘and said, “Oh, big problem . . . maybe I’ll have to find another club for him.” And the day after that, Éric’s adviser Jean-Jacques Amorfini called me and told me, “Gérard, it’s a right mess at Leeds, Éric wants to go.”’

  This version of events differed so markedly from the account Alex Ferguson would give later on – according to which the prising of Éric Cantona from Leeds occurred almost by chance – that I got in touch with Dennis Roach (who’d been at both the Rangers games) to see if he could vouchsafe Gérard’s story. No football agent wielded more influence in English football than Roach at the time. He was adamant: yes, Manchester United ‘had already made several enquiries about Cantona’ weeks before the transfer was concluded. What’s more, ‘Wilkinson agreed that if Éric didn’t want to stay at Leeds, he could go to United’.

  Wilkinson didn’t lose – or jettison, according to whom you’re listening to – Cantona without doing everything in his power to try and keep him at Eiland Road, but he had never had to tame as weird and unpredictable an animal as this one. Éric had become ‘unmanageable’ as far as he was concerned. Sometimes, Howard would pull the carrot out of his bag; at others, Sergeant Wilko wielded the stick, only to find out that his player didn’t respond to either. To Cantona, Wilkinson’s increasingly desperate attempts to rebuild bridges over a widening chasm demonstrated incoherence on the manager’s behalf. ‘One moment he would tell me that he wants me to know that I owe everything to him,’ he confided to his ghostwriter a few months later, ‘that I am only a Frenchman lost in the English league and at other times he would say to me that without me the team is nothing and that I am the essential part.’

  Cantona’s teammates didn’t know what to make of the meltdown between Éric and Wilkinson. Lee Chapman, for one, didn’t doubt that Cantona’s performances so far demanded his regular inclusion in the starting line-up. But he also felt that his manager’s favoured ‘direct’ tactics did not exploit the Frenchman’s qualities to the full. As Éric enjoyed dropping off behind the first line of attack, play more often than not passed him by. Chapman’s head, not Cantona’s feet, acted as a magnet for the ball when Leeds were in possession. A frustrated Éric didn’t attempt to hide that he longed for a more measured approach – to which Wilkinson seemed to be receptive for a while; but when results went against him, the manager reverted to the tried-and-tested formula
that had brought him two titles over the past year. Subbed against Stuttgart in Barcelona, subbed again in Glasgow, Cantona didn’t even leave the bench when Leeds travelled to Queens Park Rangers three days after their defeat at Ibrox. By then, the camel’s back had been well and truly broken.

  The team had arrived in London on the eve of the game, and set up camp in the Royal Lancaster hotel, a few paces away from Hyde Park. Gary McAllister and Cantona sat in the lounge that evening and talked about what the future held for their ailing club, and what role the Frenchman would play in it. According to Gary – Éric’s closest friend at Eiland Road – both agreed that Leeds could only progress if a means could be found to make Cantona ‘the focal point of the team’. They went further, and discussed ‘how the team should maximize his ability to get the ball in the right area’ – hardly the kind of subject that would be raised by a footballer desperate to find a new club.

  But this was not the last conversation Éric had that night. Howard Wilkinson couldn’t have known how ill-timed his intervention was, but its impact on Cantona was all the more dramatic for that. One minute, Éric was sharing his worries, but also his hopes, with a trusted teammate. The next, a man he regarded with a mixture of respect and incomprehension was informing him that he had been dropped. Wilkinson might not have been the subtlest of psychologists, but had always endeavoured to act honestly, which is why he told Cantona: ‘Look, we’re struggling, you have certain qualities, but we are very much a team that has to have a pattern. People have to do jobs, we have to think in terms of what is the overall shape and strategy, and at the moment it is not possible to have the consistent team and selection [I] would like.’ The manager’s honesty was commendable, and might have been rewarded by another man; but Éric’s pride prevented him from seeing in those words anything but an abandonment. If Wilkinson couldn’t trust him in an hour of need, how could he, Cantona, trust Wilkinson? According to the manager, Éric refused to accept his decision, which led to a surreal scene the next morning, once the players had returned from a light training session in the nearby park.

  The squad assembled to hear who would and who wouldn’t be selected for the afternoon game at Loftus Road. All knew that Cantona had requested and been granted a few days’ leave to return to France, as Leeds wouldn’t be playing again for a week. But nobody expected Wilkinson to rise from his chair and say: ‘Éric, here’s your passport, off you go!’ In full view of teammates, who didn’t know where to look, Cantona collected his travel documents from the manager’s assistant Michael Hennigan. Gary Speed, one of Wilkinson’s most loyal lieutenants, still sounded bemused when he recounted the incident to Rob Wightman over a decade later. ‘Éric took his passport and had to stand up and walk out of the room. [ . . .] We had to just sit there and watch him go out. We wanted to say goodbye to Éric but no one did.’ Speed, who admired his manager’s straightforwardness, believed Wilkinson couldn’t have staged this public humiliation without a good reason, but was at a loss to say what this reason could have been. ‘It was weird, really, really weird,’ McAllister told me; but was it so ‘weird’ that Leeds went out to lose 2–1 at QPR as Éric was driving to the airport?

  Leeds’ fortunes didn’t improve much with Cantona sulking on the periphery of the first team. Rod Wallace was preferred to him when Wilkinson’s men fought out a 2–2 draw at home with Coventry. Éric was given half an hour to show his worth, far too little to make an impression. Brought back into the fold on 7 November for a trip to Manchester City (0–4) three days after United’s midweek exit from Europe, he cut a helpless figure on the pitch. He had barely seen the ball that John Lukic stooped at depressing intervals to pick out of his goal.

  The malaise had turned into a full-blown crisis: Leeds had by then the worst defensive record in the Premiership; in fact they had lost more games by the end of October than in the whole of the previous campaign. They were showing signs of imploding just like title-holders Arsenal had done the season before. Very few pundits pointed the finger at Cantona’s diminishing influence to explain the champions’ freefall. Instead they concentrated on Wilkinson’s reluctance or inability to breathe new life into an ageing squad: captain Gordon Strachan was in his thirty-sixth year, Lee Chapman and John Lukic would be thirty-three and thirty-two respectively in December, while Carl Shutt, Mel Sterland and Chris Whyte were on the wrong side of thirty. Leeds, ‘too old to regroup’, were written off in the title race, just like Manchester United (who had been beaten 1–0 at Villa Park on the day of the City debacle, and hadn’t found the net once in their last four games).

  Cantona’s own performances suffered accordingly. When Watford kicked Leeds out of the League Cup on 10 November (1–2), he was guilty of two dreadful misses, heading wide a pinpoint cross by Gordon Strachan and, unforgivably, freezing in a one-to-one with opposing ’keeper Perry Suckling. With the nearest defender ten yards away, he prodded rather than struck the ball: he had lost belief in himself just as he had lost belief in Leeds United.

  ‘At times,’ Lee Chapman said, ‘[Éric] looked almost suicidal as he moped around the dressing-room area. From my time in France [Chapman spent a few months at Niort in 1988], I knew just how isolated he felt. Being dropped is bad enough, but when it is in a strange country, and you don’t speak the language, it is considerably worse.’ As if he had to prove that his environment was to blame, and not his form, Cantona scored (with his shoulder!) France’s second goal in their 2–1 victory over Finland, four days after Leeds’ defeat at Watford. And when he returned to England, Wilkinson kept him out of the eleven which, against everyone’s expectations, halted Arsenal’s run of six wins with a resounding 3–0 win on a muddy, windswept Eiland Road pitch. A diplomatic ‘groin strain’ was alleged to have forced Cantona’s late withdrawal, not that many were fooled. This unforeseen result (which future events would show to be a fluke: Leeds would win just one of their next six games) was held up as a vindication of the manager’s choice by a minority, to which Wilkinson naturally belonged. The smouldering Cantona, by now incensed, responded by refusing to report for training on the following Tuesday. A transfer request was faxed to the club’s office, in which Éric apparently stated that he wished to join one of three English clubs: Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal. The date was 24 November 1992.

  11

  On the catwalk for Paco Rabanne.

  MANCHESTER UNITED, AT LAST

  ‘Cantona simply does not fit in well in English soccer in my view. Leeds produced by far the best team performance of this season by any club last Saturday at home to Arsenal – and Cantona was not in the side. It’s no coincidence. I don’t think Cantona has really produced for Leeds.’ Johnny Giles

  ‘I really can’t understand what all the fuss is about. We have three million unemployed people in this country, and there is all this upset about a Frenchman going to Manchester. People are saying what a blow it is to Leeds, but it would be a much bigger blow if either Gary Speed or David Batty wanted to leave the club.’ Billy Bremner

  ‘I think Cantona’s transfer is sound business. He is a good player, but I still have doubts about him. He has not played all that well in the last few weeks. He cannot have settled down all that well if he has been in to ask for a transfer, as is widely suggested. You do not get that sort of thing happening if you are a genuine good clubman and especially after he had been so well received by United supporters.’ Norman ‘Bite Yer Legs’ Hunter

  Two weeks had passed since the release of Ooh La La’s single ‘Why I Love You, I Don’t Why, But I Love You’ when Post readers picked up their copy of the paper on Friday 27 November. The headline was bad enough: ‘Ooh-er! United idol becomes a red devil – CANTONA FANS FURY’. But the photograph that illustrated the story was even worse: Alex Ferguson shaking hands with the idol of the Leeds Kop. Leeds fans had not so much received a slap in the face as a kick to their tenderest region.

  The chemistry experiment that Howard Wilkinson had attempted with that strange new element, Éric
Cantona, had ended in an explosion. Given that rumours of the deterioration in their relationship had been filtering out of the dressing-room for over a month, this shouldn’t have come as the shock it undoubtedly was for thousands of Leeds supporters. Tears were shed, however, and anger flowed in the messages that swamped the dedicated phone line the Post had set up as soon as the player’s departure had been confirmed. Of the 1,337 fans who rang the paper that day, 1,065 opposed the sale of Cantona to the club they hated more than any other. Were they listening to their heads or to their hearts? To both. And they provided another example of one of English football’s more captivating truths: the verdict of supporters may sometimes lack eloquence, but is often sounder than the opinions of professional pundits, particularly when the experts have been professional footballers themselves. The above-quoted Giles, Bremner and Hunter were joined by Emlyn Hughes (‘a flashy foreigner’), Eddie Gray (‘a fair deal’) and Jimmy Greaves (‘Cantona is not the man for [Manchester] United’) in their appraisal of Leeds’ decision to offload Cantona for a pittance. A rare instance of foresight was provided by the Daily Express (‘Leeds has handed the title to Manchester United on a plate’), while the Daily Mirror sub-editors had fun with ‘Oo-aargh Cantona’. What the old warhorses of Revie-era Leeds and dinosaurs like Hughes failed to understand was that, following the birth of the Premier League and the emergence of Sky Television, the game they had played with distinction (if not always without malice or cynicism) had already changed beyond recognition. Their distrust of anything foreign would soon belong to another era, even if, approaching the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade, some of their successors still cannot bring themselves to admit it. Leeds fans knew better than anyone what an impact Cantona’s daring and sense of adventure had had on their own faith in the club; they had responded to his flamboyance with such fervour that not just Éric, but all around him, had been lifted to a higher plane of performance – a two-fold catalysis, if you will.