Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Three days later, it was a gale that swept through Anfield, on a raw night that signalled that some complacency was creeping into the leaders’ performances. United contrived to lose a three-goal lead at Liverpool. But as every single one of their rivals took it in turns to lose when they looked poised to challenge, Alex Ferguson could console himself with a look at the table: his team still led by 13 points. In truth, the fluency of the preceding months seemed to have deserted United. They were scrapping for results: 1–0 against Sheffield United in the Cup, Éric missing an open goal; then 2–2 against first division Portsmouth in the League Cup, their fourth draw in five games.36 Even if the champions were scarcely in danger of suffering the kind of physical and mental decline that wrecked their 1991–92 season, the fact remained that their standards had been slipping for several weeks. They needed a performance that would reassert the emergence of a new order in English football. Éric, who had just recovered from a heavy cold, took it on himself to make sure it would be in their very next game.

  The majesty of Cantona’s play in United’s 1–0 victory over Spurs on 15 January was such that the White Hart Lane crowd joined the travelling supporters in applauding him off the field. The Times saluted Éric’s ‘flair, fitness and enthusiasm bordering on fanaticism’ and already installed him as favourite for the title of ‘Footballer of the Year’. United now needed just 23 points from 16 games to be champions again, and, whatever Howard Wilkinson might have had to say, it was primarily thanks to the prodigious imagination, coolness in front of goal and stamina of the Leeds reject. Ferguson’s gamble had paid off, and handsomely.

  On 22 January a lone piper playing ‘A Scottish Soldier’ slowly led the footballers of Manchester United and Everton on to the field of play. Flags were flying at half-mast, and one seat was empty in the directors’ box – that of Sir Matt Busby, whose long struggle with cancer had ended two days previously. The architect of United’s extraordinary ascent in the 1950s and 1960s would always end his pre-match team talks with one of two valedictions – ‘And now, enjoy yourselves’, or ‘Have fun!’ That day, Cantona played as if it had been Busby, not Ferguson, who had sent him on. At one point, he cushioned Ryan Giggs’s dipping cross on his chest and, in one movement, swivelled to send a half-volley crashing on to the post. The opposition’s manager, Mike Walker, was mesmerized by United’s performance. ‘There is an aura about [them],’ he said. ‘They are streets ahead of the rest and their players know it. There is a swaggering arrogance about them, and this is not a criticism. [ . . .] You have no idea where their next move is coming from. You plug one hole and another one opens up. You fill that, another player comes at you.’ Walker had no hesitation in singling out Cantona as the choreographer of United’s ballet: ‘He brought it all together last season. His presence has allowed the others to play better. You can see that.’ So could Portsmouth, beaten 1–0 in the replay of their League Cup quarter-final, Éric’s glancing header setting up Brian McClair for the winner. So could Norwich, dumped out of the FA Cup on 30 January, Keane and Cantona providing the goals in a 2–0 victory – not that the goals provided the talking point in the evening’s highlights programme on television.

  The ‘enthusiasm bordering on fanaticism’ about which The Times had enthused had shown signs of becoming uncontrollable that afternoon. Phil Neal’s ‘beast’ had come to the fore. The placid Jeremy Goss, who played with Ryan Giggs in the Wales team, was the target of one of Cantona’s worst-ever tackles – a dreadful, cowardly assault that pundit Jimmy Hill had every right to call ‘vicious’, all the more unforgivable as Goss had done nothing to provoke it. The caution Éric escaped with bore no relation to the nastiness of the foul. Nor did Cantona stop there. With a quarter of an hour of the game to go, it was John Polston’s head that felt the sting of Éric’s studs, an offence that went unpunished. Alex Ferguson stuck to his policy: he publicly defended the indefensible, calling Hill ‘a prat’ for good measure, while adopting a rather different tone in the privacy of the dressing-room.37 Cantona was on the receiving end of a furious tirade, which was also aimed at a number of other hot-headed individuals in the United squad: Hughes, Ince and Keane to name but three.

  Ferguson’s explosion of anger had some effect on his players, whose behaviour improved markedly (if only temporarily) over the following weeks; but if he had been able to defuse the time bomb ticking in Cantona’s head for a short while, there was nothing he could do to alter the growing perception that his United team was behaving like a bunch of arrogant bullies who would resort to violence when things didn’t go their way, as if they had a divine right to grind their opponents into the dust. Éric’s disciplinary record throughout his first year in England had been commendable, if not examplary, and a number of observers had started to wonder whether the ‘bad boy’ image he had brought from France was deserved or not. In short succession, Culver-house, Fairclough, Goss and Polston had received the painful proof that Cantona knew how to ‘look after himself’ – and others too. As referees talk to each other just as players, fans and journalists do, it wouldn’t be long before Éric’s reputation would precede him in this circle too, so that he ceased to enjoy the leeway officials were prone to give newcomers in those days. That honeymoon was over.

  United had extended their unbeaten run to thirty-one games by mid-February. Éric had buried a predatory header in the net when QPR were defeated 3–2 at Loftus Road, and Giggs’s solitary goal against Sheffield Wednesday had brought them within touching distance of the League Cup final. Bookmakers slashed the odds on an unprecedented domestic treble. Life was sweet with France as well. Aimé Jacquet’s first game in charge – Éric christening his captain’s armband on this occasion – saw Les Bleus beat Italy in Italy for the first time since 1912. The ‘worst night in [his] life’ – Bulgaria’s triumph in Paris – was fast receding from Cantona’s memory.

  Then, on 20 February, at Selhurst Park, in front of 27,511 spectators (most of whom were wearing Manchester United shirts), Éric scored one of his most aesthetically satisfying goals, one which has been replayed often enough on television to become a perfect trailer for the film of his English career. It was only the fifth round of the FA Cup; and it was only Wimbledon; but it was also a moment in which it was possible to feel gratitude for Éric’s fantasy of the footballer-artist.

  Vinnie Jones, in so many ways the antithesis of the player Cantona dreamed himself to be, had been snapping at his heels, calves and knees for most of the game. David Elleray, who refereed on that night, should have sent off the thug-in-chief of the ‘Crazy Gang’ as early as the 21st minute, for an absurdly high two-foot lunge on Éric. A yellow card gave the adoptive Welshman relative licence to carry on doing his dirty job. He failed to close on his target on this occasion, however. In one movement, Éric defined a space that he alone could inhabit, where there was no place for the Joneses of this world. A ball was floated in from the left wing, which the Dons’ defender Gary Elkins could only loop out of the box. Cantona teed it up on the volley with the instep of his right foot, and smashed it into the left corner of Sullivan’s net, combining two perfect arcs of the ball to create a perfect goal, a wonder of geometry, poise and violence that had ripples of delight brushing the collective flesh of the crowd.

  In any sport, what differentiates greatness from mere exceptional talent is the capacity to invent time and space where there appears to be none; Brian Lara delaying the roll of his wrists to execute an impossibly late cut; Roger Federer picking an Andy Roddick serve on the up, to send it hurrying down the line; Éric Cantona fashioning this goal, exquisite and brutal in its execution, almost proving to us and to himself that he was right in his assertion that football could belong to the realm of art.

  I hope I can be forgiven a short pause at this point in Éric Cantona’s story, as what I’m writing now, I felt at the time. This ball took a fraction of a second to lodge itself into the net; it also took for ever. Even United’s ugly green-and-yellow away strip acquired some kind of
beauty at that moment. Then, of course, the beauty became a memory of beauty, no less affecting, but gone all the same. Even the greatest of sports’ artists must accept that any thought of immortality is a delusion. To most of them, in any case, what we perceive as an expression of art is, simply, part of their job; you wouldn’t have caught Alfredo Di Stefano comparing himself to Velázquez. Federer’s astonishing exploration of his gift is a selfish enterprise, an attempt to find the answer to this question: how far can I go? But because this adventurous impulse takes place in a public arena, it becomes almost a gift to others.

  We touch here upon a particular paradox that Cantona experienced with a far greater intensity than most, if not all, of the footballers he played with. At certain moments sport has as profound and life-changing an effect as painting or music can bring about on those who witness the act of creation. But no sportsman is an artist, regardless of how much he or she would want to be considered one. I am convinced that Cantona’s outbursts of temper, his reluctance to take root, his chronic instability are, when distilled, expressions of his raging at the limitations of his gift and of his awareness (from a very young age: think of the interview he gave to France Football in the autumn of 1987, when he was just twenty-one: see page 69) that, no matter how great his on-field achievements may be, he had never become the tormented, misunderstood creator of genius he wished to be in his naïve dreams. Despite the virtual afterlife provided by television, the lifespan of a footballer is a short one, circumscribed by living memory. As Cantona himself has said on many occasions, retirement is ‘a form of death’.

  Time and again, he has insisted on the expressive dimension of football; to him, expression and creation are one and the same thing. ‘Football is the most beautiful of arts’ (he was still playing when he said that); or ‘art is finding spontaneity in everything. An actor is trying to find the spontaneity of a child when he says a sentence. A painter tries to be as free and as spontaneous as possible’ (a statement of such conventionality it would have warranted inclusion in a modern-day Flaubert’s dictionary of received ideas). One of his ways of living with the frustration he, a mere ball-kicker, must have felt, was to invent a model of the artist which he could identify with, at least in terms of character and behaviour. I wonder what opinion he may have had of a Charles Ives or a Henri Matisse, bourgeois poets, for whom sitting at the piano or sketching a nude in the studio fitted in a work routine comparable to that of a computer programmer. Matisse was the most reluctant of theorists and phrase-makers when it came to his art. But on the rare occasions when he did speak, he said that, to him, art was about expression, no doubt, but remained rooted in a need to give shape and colour (he could have been talking of musical notes, or textures, or words) to an individual’s response to his experience. Art could not be a mere arrangement of forms, presented to the senses of the contemplator.

  Football, however, even at its most enthrallingly beautiful, or, if you prefer, ‘artistic’, is nothing but pure manifestation; it is not a response to anything other than itself; it is an unfolding. The flow of the ball is self-contained, self-referential – and unrepeatable. A perfectly executed free kick might require just as much time on the training field as a bassoonist, say, will spend rehearsing the first bars of The Rite of Spring in the concert hall. But whereas the bassoonist will be able to play the same line time after time, finding new shades of tone and refining new articulations, even the greatest footballer we could dream of would fail to repeat a single one of his masterful creations. A football team is not an orchestra. You do not pit two ensembles against each together, playing two scores which are not just incompatible in terms of meter and key, but also try to nullify each other, despite the wildest experiments of avant-garde composers. The greatest of managers is not a conductor, and the footballer-artist is not a soloist: you do not write footballs on a stave. But Éric was driven by the belief that somehow, some were given the ability to do so – Cruyff, Maradona, himself. On that evening in Wimbledon, he wasn’t very far from convincing the rest of the world he was right.

  Reality reasserted itself quickly after the media had rhapsodized about the Wimbledon wondergoal. United seemed to be cruising at that point in the season, albeit less comfortably than before, as Blackburn Rovers, carried by Alan Shearer’s torrent of goals, had closed the gap to seven points (having played one game more). Ferguson’s team could nonetheless leave West Ham with a 2–2 draw the following weekend without feeling the need to look nervously behind them – not yet anyway. A 4–1 defeat of Sheffield Wednesday gave United a place in the League Cup final and appeared to have put them back on course. Éric, feeling the effects of a knock on the shin sustained at Upton Park, missed that game and had not fully recovered when Chelsea ended United’s series of thirty-four games without defeat. Just as he had done at Stamford Bridge in September, Gavin Peacock scored the only goal of that encounter, neatly bookending United’s superb run. And so it was that against all odds, Blackburn had positioned themselves in the champion’s slipstream. The rest had no hope of catching up with either club. Arsenal, in third place, were a full 14 points behind United.

  The chance of a major upset in the title race soon receded, however. United saw off Charlton 3–1 in an FA Cup quarter-final, despite playing with ten men for the whole of the second half after Peter Schmeichel had been dismissed for a professional foul outside his box. They confirmed they had woken up for good when Cantona orchestrated a 5–0 rout of Sheffield Wednesday on a pitch white with hailstones in mid-March. Éric’s timing was splendid. The publication of his autobiography on the 10th of that month had provoked a furore that was quite out of proportion with the book’s contents, as we’ll see. But there were a number of pundits and commentators who seized on its more controversial chapters to question, again, Éric’s work rate, character and contribution to the English game. What a response he gave them. He started by picking up the ball in his own half and, spotting Giggs some 70 yards away, conjured the ball to land sweetly in the path of the winger, who rounded the ’keeper and scored with less than a quarter of an hour on the clock. Two minutes later, one of Cantona’s flicks fell for Hughes, who found the net from fully 30 yards. Éric did the job himself for United’s fourth after being put through by Paul Ince. But he had kept the best for last. A fluid move released Ince, who fed Cantona, who dummied, let the ball run, wrong-footed the defender, spun on a sixpence and sent the ball into the goal via the inside of a post.

  Curiously, the British media hadn’t picked up on the original French title of Cantona’s book, Un Rêve modeste et fou (‘A Humble and Crazy Dream’, which became Cantona: My Story in English, for some reason). This slim volume had been in bookshops for quite a few months already, but British tabloids did not yet employ French-based staff to scour the local press for recycled ‘exclusives’, as is the case today. Factually wrong and inexcusably short (142 pages in its original version, excluding Éric’s rambling foreword), Cantona: My Story still packed a punch – especially if your name was Howard Wilkinson. The book’s innumerable mistakes (most of which have been conscientiously reprinted as gospel truth since then) went unnoticed, which wasn’t the case of the page-and-a-half – that’s all, a page-and-a-half – devoted to Cantona’s exit from Eiland Road. It can’t have been pleasant for the manager who gave Éric his chance to shine in English football to read that his attitude towards the player had been ‘bizarre’ and ‘rather incoherent’. Even more damagingly for his former coach, Cantona, via his ghostwriter Pierre-Louis Basse, insinuated that the real reason for his departure from Yorkshire was Wilkinson’s desire to find a scapegoat for his side’s poor start to the season, and that his ‘solution’ was, first, to ‘spread rumours’ of the player’s refusal to accept the authority of his coach, then to accept a ridiculously low offer from Manchester United in order to show that sacrifices had to be made to get rid of the troublemaker. This was not Cantona’s finest hour, it must be said. The inelegance of his attack on Wilkinson left a bitter taste
in the mouth, especially as he concluded it with a meaningless pirouette: ‘there’s only a small step to take to say that he doesn’t like strong personalities who have an impact on the fans, but I won’t take that step’. Really?

  Soon after, Wilkinson expressed a desire to slug it out. ‘I’ve kept my own counsel for fifteen months,’ he said, ‘effectively shielding many of those involved. But given the way Éric has seen fit to reopen the debate, I have no alternative but to spell out the facts.’ But he didn’t, not until much later, long after Cantona had retired, long after Leeds United had parted with the manager who gave them their only league title in the last thirty-five years – and counting. Whatever the manager’s shortcomings may have been, to turn Wilkinson into some kind of Machiavelli reeked of self-serving expediency.