Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  The two men then made their way to the press room, where Éric was to be formally introduced to the British media as a Manchester United player. Alex Ferguson opened the proceedings in his idiosyncratic French: ‘Mon plaisir à présenter Éric Cantona’ – bringing a faint smile to Éric’s lips. Like most great managers, Ferguson has used and continues to use the press to relay a message to the only audience he really cares for: his players; on this occasion, he was addressing the Frenchman who was sitting by his side, interpreter in tow.30 ‘Éric is the goalscorer we have been looking for,’ he said. ‘He is a very exciting footballer, the type Manchester United fans love. He is one of the best entertainers in the country.’ Ferguson couldn’t resist a small dig at Éric’s former club: ‘I do believe he was instrumental in Leeds winning the championship last season. He has flair, he has class, and we have now provided him with the biggest of stages upon which to perform.’

  From the outset, Ferguson was implementing the policy from which he would never deviate throughout Cantona’s stay in Manchester: talk Éric up, reassure him, shore up his fragile confidence at every possible opportunity. Houllier and Bielderman had advised him to become a surrogate father to Cantona. It is a tribute to Ferguson’s considerable gifts as a psychologist that he immediately felt that no other course of action was open to him. He later wrote: ‘I had resolved when he [Éric] arrived that I would ignore all past attempts to present him as an enfant terrible, I would judge him on what he was like in his dealings with me, making my aim to communicate with him regularly and to try and understand him. He was not, I soon discovered, the overwhelmingly confident person many perceived him to be. He needed nourishing.’ Éric’s first day at Old Trafford provided Ferguson with a chance to do just that, in public, and set a pattern that would transform the player – and, ultimately, the club.

  It helped that both men took an instant shine to each other. Cantona would not hesitate to talk about a case of ‘love at first sight’, and confided to his friend Bernard Morlino: ‘Ferguson fills us with a joy of living. Either you enter the tourbillon [whirlwind], or you’re thrown outside the hurricane.’ Note the violent undertones to Cantona’s metaphor; note, too, how little room is left for reason in this appraisal – what matters is the ‘joy of living’. The young footballer of Auxerre had said: ‘Maybe, on the day I caressed a ball for the first time, 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.’ The twenty-six-year-old wanted to believe that the time to do so had come at last.

  Howard Wilkinson had lost his way when attempting to read the confused map of Éric’s character. All he could see was a tangle of roads whose destination was unclear. He might have understood that the firebrand he had brought to Leeds needed to be cajoled into abeyance; but he was unable to bring himself to define a space that Cantona and Cantona alone could occupy in his team, as this jarred with both his instinct and all he’d learnt in his own tough ascent from lower-league pro to champion of England. It would have gone against what had made him a successful manager – his organizational skills, his ability to instil discipline in a group, his rigorous (some would say rigid) approach to the game of football. Football, an art form? Not bloody likely! A battle, yes.

  Ferguson was cut from a different cloth. To him, discipline was a means to an end, not an inflexible imperative of man-management. He knew how to instil fear in a player’s eyes, but he also had an intuitive grasp of other people’s insecurities and how best to exploit them; kindness and understanding, which came naturally to him, were other weapons in his arsenal. I have only spent a few hours in Ferguson’s company, but, like so many before me, I was struck by his easy charm and his genuine ability to listen to the interlocutor of the moment. What time he had given me felt like a gift, presented without affectation; though it’s also true that I was kept on my toes by a sense of imminent danger. I most certainly didn’t want to cross that man, and realized it wouldn’t be very difficult to do so.

  Ferguson knew how all but a very few professionals are inhabited by a sometimes overwhelming sense of anguish, how much doubt preys on them, and how what differentiates the great from the good can also be the capacity to conquer a deep-rooted feeling of inadequacy, rather than an unshakeable self-belief in one’s ability. So, how best to deal with Cantona? Ferguson’s secret was of the utmost simplicity: tea. As he told Gérard Houllier, ‘Every day, I had a cup of tea with him. Every day.’ We now know how Éric responded to that, as he had responded to Guy Roux’s grumpily affectionate guidance, and to Marc Bourrier’s gentler, but still father-like rule. Ferguson also realized – again, from the very beginning, which is why the point must be made at this stage in the story – that he would have to allow his recruit far more leeway in the day-to-day life of the club. At first, some of the other players found it difficult to believe, and accept, that such a notorious hellraiser could be forgiven lapses in United’s code of conduct which would have earned them a severe reprimand and, in some cases, more serious punishment. Éric showed admirable dedication on the training ground, often staying behind with a couple of youth-team players to practise his scales when others had long since closed the piano lid. But he also turned up late on a few occasions, without incurring the wrath of his coach, who equally tolerated various infringements to the club’s dress code by the Frenchman. Lee Sharpe has told how he was the subject of a verbal lashing by his manager when turning up at a civic function dressed in a snazzy silk suit, whereas Cantona, wearing T-shirt and trainers, had waltzed in without so much as a peep from Ferguson.

  Éric was a man apart? Treat him like one, and see what happens. And what happened was that, out of respect for and gratitude to a manager who was treating him with the kind of empathy and kindness he had longed for, Cantona learned to conform to United’s rules and regulations. Docile, perhaps not; accommodating, certainly. And as the effect his presence had on the team’s performance grew more obvious – and this was clear to see in a matter of a few weeks – professional footballers who could have felt jealousy, even rancour, towards the teacher’s pet accepted that a different man could be treated differently, all the more so since Cantona never sought to aggrandize himself because of the special status he enjoyed at The Cliff, Manchester United’s training ground.

  It also helped that the Glaswegian had a genuine liking for all things French, and not just the grands crus of Burgundy he stocks in his cellar. ‘If Alex had been English,’ Erik Bielderman told me, ‘I’m quite sure things wouldn’t have worked out as well as they did. Their non-Englishness created a bond between them.’ On the day Éric faced the press for the first time in Manchester, Ferguson had made a point of mentioning the Auld Alliance (and promising a new one). Many years later, long after the promise had been fulfilled, he added: ‘Cantona is the man who had “La Marseillaise” sung from the stands at Old Trafford. Can you imagine more than 60,000 Englishmen singing “La Marseillaise” with a single voice?’

  12

  Cantona’s return to Elland Road.

  THE HOMECOMING:

  1992–93

  ‘If there was ever a player in this world who was made for Manchester United, it was Cantona. I think he had been searching all his life for somebody who looked at him and made him feel that a place was his home. He had travelled around so many countries; there is a wee bit of the gypsy about some people. But when he came here, he knew: this is my place.’ Alex Ferguson

  Isabelle and Raphaël – who was now two years old – had stayed behind in their Moortown semi near Roundhay Park, where many of the family’s possessions remained in the sealed cardboard boxes that had been sent from Nîmes at the beginning of the previous summer. Éric had lived like a soldier who is billeted wherever his regiment is sent, not like the vagabond of his youthful dreams. For Isabelle, there was no sense of adventure in being pulled this way and that in the wake of an unsettled player; only tedium and uncertainty. In the seven years they had lived together
, the young couple had moved their belongings from Auxerre to Aix-en-Provence, Martigues, Marseilles, Nîmes and Leeds (Éric lived on his own in Bordeaux), but not once had they settled. Only Guy Roux’s house in the forest had felt like a real home, at a time when there was no child to find a school for and fame was just a rumour.

  Isabelle had grown fond of Leeds. She had found a job which suited her, running French conversation classes at the local university. Her neighbours, cautious at first, had taken to the unassuming Frenchwoman, just as she had taken to their simplicity and warm-heartedness. The Cantonas’ small garden often filled with Raphael’s schoolmates on evenings and weekends, and the children were soon followed by their parents, whom Isabelle came to rely upon more and more to guide her through the apprenticeship of life in another country. ‘Where I come from,’ she told a passing journalist, ‘people live outdoors, so we try to do the same thing here. We just take an umbrella.’ And umbrella in hand, Éric and Isabelle set out to explore the countryside of Yorkshire. They discovered Bridlington, Scarborough, Bolton Abbey, Haworth and walked the galleries of Leeds City Museum. Éric’s still imperfect command of English made their visits to movie theatres less frequent than they would have wished (once in Manchester, when it had improved, he would be a regular visitor to the Cornerhouse, a cinéma d’art et d’essai beneath the railway arches by Oxford Road station); but, all in all, their life passed pleasantly enough. Eiland Road would become a bowl of hate when Cantona returned there in his new colours, but the crowd’s venom had not brimmed over the stadium walls at that stage. In Isabelle’s presence, ‘people were sad,’ she said, ‘but not nasty or aggressive’ – not yet, anyway. She preferred to remember the extraordinary welcome the fans had given her husband, which had brought tears to her eyes. For all these reasons, Isabelle decided to stay put. Leeds would remain their home, to which Éric would return whenever he could.

  It was an odd arrangement – or so it struck me, when I realized that the hotel in which he decided to set up his home from home (the Manchester West Novotel, in Worsley Brow, not the Mottram Hall hotel where new United players usually found a temporary base) was only a twenty-five minute drive away from Leeds on the M62. Many commuters with far less free time on their hands than a professional footballer routinely travel over far longer distances, day after day. But a room was booked in his name – throughout the year. Cantona explained his choice to a journalist from L’Humanité 2. few months later. ‘It suits me,’ he said. ‘I do not need to give three months’ notice, or to organize moving out, with all the time it takes. A credit card is all you need to say goodbye.’ This flippant remark might have been meant to shake his questioner a bit, another variation on the ‘Cantona the adventurer’ theme, but there’s no denying its underlying callousness.

  Then again, the borderline between independence of spirit and plain egotism can be a very thin one, and it could be argued that Éric’s integration into United’s squad would benefit from his being as close as possible to the two nerve centres of his club – The Cliff and Old Trafford. What’s more, the Novotel was conveniently located just round the corner from Ryan Giggs’ new house, and the Welsh prodigy (a few days away from his nineteenth birthday at the time of Éric’s arrival in Manchester) could give Cantona regular lifts to the training ground and to the stadium. Like Gary McAllister before him, Giggs discovered that Cantona’s English gained a great deal of fluency when fellow footballers surrounded him, not journalists.

  In the beginning, Cantona naturally did most of his talking with the ball, and a short training session arranged on the morning of United’s game against Arsenal, on 28 November, provided his new teammates with proof that this was a language he spoke more fluently than most. Steve Bruce was among those who had been puzzled by the news of Éric’s arrival; but the central defender later admitted that he ‘didn’t realize the quality [Cantona] had’. ‘I’d never really seen that at Leeds,’ he said. ‘We knew he was a good player, but I didn’t realize the skills, the balance and the vision he’d got. As soon as I’d seen him in training, I knew he’d give us another dimension.’ Éric had been registered with the Premier League too late to figure that day, and watched from the stands as Mark Hughes gave United a 1–0 victory over the 1991 champions. Ferguson’s team now stood sixth in the championship table, nine points behind the unexpected pace-setters, Norwich – and six ahead of Leeds, who suffered their sixth League defeat of the season a day later at Chelsea.

  The events of the previous week had created quite a stir in France, even if only the most dedicated readers of L’Équipe and France Football could gauge how much of a shock the news of Cantona’s transfer was for Leeds and Manchester United supporters. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Premier League highlights were still a novelty in French TV schedules at the time, and that they only gained prominence because of Éric’s growing stature on the other side of the Channel. English football and Éric Cantona would remain synonymous for a majority of the French audience until Arsène Wenger took charge of Arsenal in November 1996. Claims that Éric ‘invented’ English football in France are not too wide of the mark; until then, you would tune in to the Sunday evening sports programmes in the hope of seeing the nation’s favourite maverick in action, surrounded by Anglo-Saxons whose names were routinely butchered beyond recognition by commentators. A change of club for Éric Cantona would not normally have been news in France – just another twist in an increasingly convoluted tale. But with Les Bleus’ next World Cup qualification game two-and-a-half months away (a trip to Israel), everyone wanted to know exactly how Gérard Houllier’s key player was getting on. L’Équipe duly dispatched my colleague Jean-Philippe Bouchard to find out. It made for interesting reading.

  He joined Éric in St Albans, where United had set up camp before their match at Highbury. Some of Cantona’s comments must have caused astonishment in Yorkshire. No, he’d never had any problems at Leeds and, had Manchester United not made an offer, he’d have been quite happy to stay there. He’d had enough of these ‘rumours’ about being angry with substitutions. He hadn’t been subbed, merely ‘rested’. He’d been injured before the Arsenal-Leeds game, nothing else. Wilkinson was making gratuitous accusations. ‘You only have to look at my performances for Leeds to be convinced I was worth my place,’ he said. ‘Eight goals, eight assists – I was a hit with everyone. I had become the leader.’ On the other hand, he admitted, ‘I like change. I need it more than most people. I like to live for the moment. It’s as true for my game as it is for my career and my life. I’ve always been like this; I need to fill up my tank with energy, to start from zero again. That’s what gives me the most pleasure. What’s more, that’s what enables me to improve, to go up one level after another, like a mountaineer who climbs up the small peaks in his area before confronting Everest. You see a lot of civil servants in football. This type of behaviour doesn’t agree with me. I become bad. Moving on excites me, and only excitement allows me to play well.’ Is it any wonder that Eiland Road soon learnt a couple of new songs? ‘He’s gay, he’s French/He’s always on the bench/Cantona, Cantona’ was one. ‘He’s French, he’s dumb/He’ll do fuck all with scum [i.e. Manchester United]’ the other. It would get worse.

  Much to Bouchard’s surprise, he ended up staying with Cantona for two weeks. The Manchester United squad had left England immediately after the Arsenal game for a golfing break in Portugal, where a testimonial match with Benfica had been arranged in honour of that club’s – and that country’s – greatest-ever player, Eusébio. Cantona and Bouchard, footballer and journalist, made their way to Lisbon under their own steam. Jean-Philippe’s most salient memory of that trip – apart from serving as an impromptu translator at a press conference – is of Cantona wolfing down his airline meal, then picking up the tray his travelling companion hadn’t finished yet. When Bouchard protested, Éric simply answered: ‘I’m still hungry,’ and ate the lot.

  The match itself was a non-event. The Estádio da Luz, bathed in pale autumn
al sunlight, was barely half full when Éric took the field in the red jersey of Manchester United for the first time. Ferguson’s players trotted on to the pitch and lost 1–0, having posed close to no threat. Brian McClair, with whom Cantona had been paired upfront in the first half, was invisible; Mark Hughes, who took the Scot’s place after the interval, merely subdued. Éric kicked defender Abel Silva – and earned a caution, quite a feat in a game of that nature. The poor quality of his team’s performance didn’t worry Ferguson unduly: this brief escapade to Portugal was designed to strengthen the bond between his players, and according to Ryan Giggs, proved a success in that respect. The whole squad descended on a casino ‘for a laugh and a few beers’, in other words, to get drunk, and found in Cantona a willing companion. According to Giggs, Éric took an instant liking to goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel, with whom he later roomed on trips. He liked the Dane’s fiery temper on the field, and his far more relaxed attitude off it. Schmeichel was a bit of an artist too, an accomplished amateur pianist who entertained his teammates with renditions of West End musicals at parties.