Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  The track record of the two managers involved boded well for neither. Alex Ferguson had suceeded Ron Atkinson at Old Trafford in November 1986 after a catastrophic start to that season had seen United feel the first glows of heat from what the Italians call football’s inferno. ‘Big Ron’ had lasted a little over five seasons in Manchester, long enough to win two FA Cups and throw away a championship title in 1985–86 after his side had strung together ten victories on the trot. Ferguson’s own record in domestic competitions was better than Atkinson’s, but not by much: one FA Cup (in 1990), one League Cup (in 1992) and two runners-up spots in the top division (in 1988 and 1992) which, in the eyes of many, made him a ‘choker’ when it came to the prize all Manchester United fans had their eyes on. A tremendous success over Barcelona in the 1990–91 European Cup Winners’ Cup final had given him the breathing space that Atkinson had been denied. Luck, sound judgement and Éric Cantona helped him to exploit it to the full, in proportions that it would be foolish to ascertain. But luck definitely came first, and on two occasions.

  On 10 April, a valiant Sheffield Wednesday seemed destined to bring back a point from Old Trafford with the score locked at a goal apiece after 90 minutes. That result would have given Villa (who drew 0–0 against Coventry) a two-point cushion over their rivals, but referee John Hilditch couldn’t quite bring the whistle to his lips and, unaccountably, allowed an extra 8’30” to be played that afternoon, Steve Bruce scoring the winning goal with a header seconds before Hilditch remembered it was time to go home. Alex Ferguson could afford to make a joke of it. ‘We didn’t start playing until the 99th minute,’ he said. United now led Villa by 69 points to 68. Two days later, not so much luck as a miracle or two enabled them to win 1–0 at Coventry, cancelling out Villa’s remarkable win by the same margin at Highbury. Éric played with a sprained wrist for which the team doctor refused to administer a painkiller, until the excruciating pain forced him to hand his place to Bryan Robson – who was so unfit that he had decided to drop himself to the bench in the first place and give the skipper’s armband to Steve Bruce. A bad goalkeeping error by Coventry’s Jonathan Gould gifted Dennis Irwin a goal, while a Roy Wegerle shot cannoned off Peter Schmeichel’s upright and rolled along the goal-line without crossing it. Disaster had been averted – just.

  But luck had no need to intervene when Chelsea turned up at Old Trafford on 17 April to be turned over 3–0. The London club had last succumbed in Manchester sixteen years earlier, the year United last won the title, and it may be that this barely credible statistic (mentioned in every match preview) had helped Ferguson’s players concentrate on their task rather more intently than had been the case in their previous outings. It may also be that they remembered how, almost a year to the day, their failure to overcome Chelsea in similar circumstances had opened the door for Leeds to win the trophy. Lee Sharpe danced on the wing, Cantona executed the final pirouette, signing off with his eighteenth goal of the season in English domestic competitions, an astonishing return for a player whose future had been in the balance during the autumn. Still, Villa, who were in action the next day, responded in kind, and beat Manchester’s other team 3–1 – to the delight of some City supporters. United, who boasted a vastly superior goal difference (+31 v. +22), kept the upper hand but remained one slip-up away from catastrophe.

  But it was Villa who imploded, conceding two goals within the first fifteen minutes of their visit to Blackburn Rovers, to end up losing 3–0 at Ewood Park. United didn’t put on the most convincing of shows either, at relegation-threatened Crystal Palace: the teams were still tied at 0–0 in the sixty-fifth minute, when Cantona and Hughes combined to break the deadlock, the Welshman concluding the move with one of his trademark volleys. Éric also provided the pass that sent Paul Ince through for United’s second goal, which effectively ended the game as a contest, and virtually gave his team the title, as a single victory in their last two games would be enough to ward off Aston Villa. In fact, just as had happened the previous season, when he’d watched himself win the championship from Lee Chapman’s sofa, the trophy fell into Cantona’s lap before he’d had time to lace his boots. The Oldham midfielder Nick Henry sent a left-footed shot past Mark Bosnich at 15:30 on 2 May, and his team held on to their slender advantage in front of 35,000 dumbstruck Aston Villa fans. The long wait had ended: when Manchester United took the field twenty-four hours later against Blackburn Rovers, it would be as champions, for the first time since 1967.

  A few years ago, I started compiling what I hoped would be an English-French/French–English football glossary, which would help me in my work as a translator, and for which I had a vague hope of finding a publisher. It was a revealing task. I couldn’t have wished for a clearer illustration of the chasm between our footballing cultures. It seemed the French (and, indeed, the Spaniards, the Italians and, believe it or not, the Germans) had at their disposal an arsenal of descriptive words and phrases which my English press-box colleagues had yet to coin. I first encountered a problem when trying to find an equivalent to ‘l’amour du geste’, an expression Éric has always been fond of using. ‘Geste’ has no equivalent, unless you accept piece of skill’, which lacks the (maybe excessive) nobility of the French noun, whose semantic history encapsulates both sleight of hand (or foot in this case) and tales of chivalry (which we call chansons de geste’; Cantona as Sir Lancelot – now there’s a casting idea). The British had ‘nutmeg’ for petit pont’ (‘small bridge’, a self explanatory expression); but no grand pont’ (‘big’ or, rather, ‘long bridge’, when the attacking player, typically a winger, kicks the ball past the defender on one side, and races on the other to get hold of it). Everything else was a ‘flick’. I couldn’t find an approximation for aile de pigeon’ (‘pigeon’s wing’, of course), a marvellously evocative semantic shortcut for one of football’s most elegant gestes’: running forward, the player receives the ball slightly behind him, and by shaping his leg as a trussed bird’s wing, ‘flicks it’ in front of him with the outside of the boot. We’ve also got the ‘madjer’, named after the delightful Moroccan player Rabah Madjer, a backheel behind the standing leg – only used when it is an attempt at goal. And the coup du sombrero’, a Patrick Vieira special, which involves lifiing a ball – generally on the volley – above an opponent’s head (hence ‘sombrero’,) before resuming control of it on the other side. For a perfect example of this, watch Cantona’s famous cracker for Leeds against Chelsea at the end of the 1991–92 season, when poor Paul Elliott did a convincing impersonation of a hat-stand – twice. Or watch Paul Gascoigne fooling Colin Hendry to score the most famous of his England goals at Wembley. There are many other such words – ‘feuille morte’ (‘dead leaf’ – a shot struck with very little power, which relies on precision and surprise to float into a goalkeeper’s top corner, used almost exclusively of free kicks), and the ‘coup du foulard’ (‘kerchief’s trick’) being just two of the most popular in my home country. Even as basic a skill as a ‘déviation’ (a first-time pass in which the course of the ball is merely altered by contact with the outside of the foot) is referred to as a ‘flick’, again. What surprises me most is that it’s not as if these were outlandish pieces of skill’ that had proved beyond the talent of British-born footballers. All of them were in George Best’s repertoire, and Robin Friday’s, and Chris Waddle’s. Pelés sublime grand pont’ – without even touching the ball – on Uruguayan goalkeeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz in the 1970 World Cup has been played umpteen times on the BBC, not that Barry Davies or John Motson would have known how to describe it without resorting to paraphrase. But we are not talking about unique inventions such as Fernando Redondo’s ‘forward backheel’, which led to one of the greatest goals in European Cup history when Real Madrid beat Manchester United 3–2 in the first leg of the 1999–2000 Champions League semi-final. These are skills which are attempted by every street footballer in the world, be they from Sao Salvador da Bahia, Sheffield or Les Caillols. What is astonishing is that the Eng
lish never developed a vocabulary that would enable them to refer to some of a footballer’s most balletic and, sometimes, efficient expressions of his talent on the training ground, in match reports or in pub conversations. Could it be that such fancy flicks were and still are considered unfair play, ‘not cricket’, if you will? Could they be perceived as too arrogant, against the true spirit of the game?

  During Éric’s first two seasons in particular, on the rare occasions when he failed to ignite Manchester United’s play, reporters and columnists were quick, often ridiculously so, to point out the eccentricities of the flashy foreigner’ (an expression used by Emlyn Hughes, you’ll remember, to characterize Cantona the day after he moved from Leeds to Manchester United); these, they implied, had been the undoing of his team, which needed ‘last-ditch tackles’ (no equivalent of this in French, by the way), not backheels and, yes, ‘flicks’. Now that British-born footballers account for less than half of the starting line-ups in the Premiership, it is worth recalling how, in the early 1990s, suspicion, not expectancy, accompanied the arrival of so-called ‘imports’ in the English League. Cantona played up to every single prejudice held by the traditionalists who ruled, played and watched the game; he reinforced these prejudices as much as he demonstrated their shallowness; and, through his success, proved them utterly devoid of judgement by behaving precisely as his fiercest critics would expect him to do. He was unpredictable, undecipherable, manifestly untamed; he also brought four championship titles to a club that had spent twenty-six years in the desert. The verbal abuse that greeted him in every ground in England, save Eiland Road and Old Trafford, of course, did not differ much from the opinions of many commentators: it was a brutal and brutish magnification of their pronouncements. Such supporters probably agreed with Emlyn Hughes’s characterization of Cantona as the ‘dark, brooding Frenchman’ of Manchester United. His comment was – if I can be forgiven this oxymoron – a coarse distillate of the pundit’s instinctive rejection of a Frenchman who embodied all that is the most foreign in a foreigner. Those who question Cantona’s greatness would do well to remember who had the last word in this particular battle.

  13

  The night it all went wrong in Galatasaray.

  THE WORST NIGHT OF ÉRIC’S LIFE

  ‘I’m not interested in the image people have of me. When I’m on the catwalk for Paco Rabanne, for example, there’s no ulterior motive, I’m just giving pleasure to my own body. The most important thing is to feel at ease within your body, without cheating yourself. To pose for a beautiful photograph is a selfish pleasure – but in life, nothing is innocent. “Tout est égoïsme” [everything is selfishness].’

  Éric had come back to Manchester from Paris on the morning’s first flight three days before the BBC opened its evening news programme with images of crowds assembling on Piccadilly to celebrate the title. His mind was still swimming with images of the previous night’s celebrations – France had beaten Sweden 2–1 at the Parc des Princes, and seemed poised to achieve qualification for the 1994 World Cup, in no small part thanks to him. He had struck a penalty shortly before half-time to cancel out Martin Dahlin’s opening goal, the first spot kick he had been entrusted with since his debut with Les Bleus nearly six years previously. Then, with eight minutes remaining on the clock, he had met a hopeful punt by Jocelyn Angioma with the tip of his boot to make it 2–1 to the French. With Papin injured, much had been expected of him in the lone striker role, and he had responded magnificently to that expectation. Dizzy with the champagne that had been flowing until 2 a.m. in a Champs-Elysées nightclub, he was already thinking of what lay in wait, which he didn’t doubt would be another celebration. For the third year running, Éric Cantona would be a national champion. No other player had ever achieved this with three different clubs. He had said – and would say again – how little he cared for the trophy won under the aegis of Tapie and Goethals with Marseille in 1991 (though he had played a crucial part in establishing a platform for its conquest); but those collected with Leeds and, especially, Manchester United, were a different matter altogether. He, a Frenchman, once a pariah in his own country, had taken the English title twice in two years for two clubs. The feat was unprecedented, and brought tangible proof that England had not been the destination of an exile desperate for a new home. He belonged there – and how.

  As Albert Square filled with the songs of supporters drunk with joy, he lay on his bed at the Novotel, answering phone call after phone call, somewhat apprehensive (as he later admitted) of the tidal wave of fervour that was sweeping through the city – even there, in the suburb of Worsley. One of Éric’s callers was Steve Bruce, who told him that all the United players were expected to turn up at his home in Bramhall that evening. Alex Ferguson had given his blessing to the party. The last of the newly crowned champions to arrive was Andreï Kanchelskis, at midnight, by which time beer and champagne had already been consumed in prodigious quantities. Éric’s new friend Bernard Morlino was there too, watching Mark Hughes (wearing the Frenchman’s red cap) and Cantona mimic memorable passages of play from the title-winning season, encouraged by the whole team. More drink was fetched in the early hours of the morning. As Gary Pallister put it, ‘We were all steamrolled.’

  Éric loved these heady moments of alcohol-fuelled bonding – not that he was a heavy drinker himself. He’d still be nursing his first flute of champagne while others were beyond counting which pint of lager they were on. Despite Alex Ferguson’s concerns and efforts to stem the culture of ‘drinking schools’ (which led to United getting rid of talented but uncontrollable characters such as Paul McGrath), it was still customary for United players to hold ‘sessions’ that baffled non-English observers such as Henri Émile, who often visited Cantona in England to pass on messages from Gérard Houllier and, later, Aimé Jacquet. Some evenings he spent with Éric’s family (‘Wives have a huge influence on players in football. They often get married when they’re very young, and I knew I could use this as a lever in certain areas – and I did’), others in the company of Cantona’s teammates. ‘What I discovered in England,’ Émile told me, ‘was the pleasure shared by the players. Éric was in the thick of it. He was the catalyst of the group. He commanded a great deal of respect. The English had really adopted him, even when things went a bit mad, as they do in England, with the beers, the cigars and the rest.’ This is not to say that French professionals never let their hair down; but their celebrations – generally held in far more salubrious surroundings than the country pubs favoured by the United players – never reached a similar pitch. They also lacked the communal dimension Éric relished so much, which gave him a sense of belonging to another family, a family united by its love of football and its delight in success. Something like paradise. Heaven knows how the hungover players managed to gather enough strength to beat Blackburn 3–1 later on that afternoon, but they did, in front of 40,447 delirious spectators, at least one of whom, a student, had walked all the way from London to be there. A poignant touch was added to the occasion by the presence of Gérard Houllier and Michel Platini in the stands; Éric knew better than anyone how much of the joy he felt was due to their unremitting efforts on his behalf. Touts quickly ran out of tickets, which had been changing hands for up to £150 before kick-off. Éric, playing with a broken wrist, heard the Old Trafford crowd sing his name to the tune of ‘La Marseillaise’ and paraded the Premier League trophy around the pitch at the final whistle, arm in arm with Peter Schmeichel (his son Raphaël’s hero), the top of the trophy balanced with one hand on his head, the most fitting of crowns for the new king of Manchester.

  The title, United’s first in twenty-six years, was also a victory for what the press misguidedly described as Ferguson’s ‘4-2-4’. But the romantics could be forgiven, as this triumph marked the rebirth of wing play in English football, more than a quarter of a century after Ramsey’s ‘wingless wonders’. A twenty-first-century analyst would describe United’s organization in that 1992–93 season as a f
luid 4-4-1-1, a lethal counter-attacking machine in which Mark Hughes, the lone frontman, would hold the ball long enough for Cantona, the withdrawn striker, to play it into space on the flanks, where Giggs and Kanchelskis could be expected to bomb forward, by which time the team’s formation could indeed be described as a 4-2-4 – but this 4-2-4 bore no relation to the revolutionary tactical set-up that Brazil had dazzled the world with at the 1958 World Cup. Though most United players were comfortable on the ball, their game was not based on keeping possession, with the patient build-up and exhilarating changes of tempo that were a hallmark of the Seleçao – not yet, anyway, as a number of unsuccessful European campaigns would soon demonstrate. More often than not, when faced with Continental defences more adept at keeping their shape than their Premier League counterparts, United’s coil would fail to spring. Nevertheless, Cantona’s contribution to the evolution of the English game towards a more ‘modern’ type of football remains grossly undervalued in my view. He was the first to demonstrate the value of the so-called ‘9-and-a-half’ – in practice, an old-style no. 10 who positions himself further down the pitch, and combines a playmaker’s vision with the finishing of a high-class striker – against the classical British flat back four. Dennis Bergkamp, possibly the greatest-ever exponent of that role, would only be signed by Arsenal two full years after United had become champions again. When the question of Cantona’s greatness is raised, his pioneering role in defining a new playing position (at least in England) is overlooked too often. In that sense, he can be talked of as an innovator, even if he was not driven by a desire to create something radically new. What is true is that he could best express himself in that transient and ambiguous space behind, and created by the movement of, the front man between the lines, as it were. He had the immense stroke of luck to play for a manager like Alex Ferguson, who was a born pragmatist in the best sense of that word, and therefore ready to alter the shape of his team to accommodate an exceptional talent.