Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Alex Ferguson supported Cantona, as he had promised himself he would always do. ‘I think Éric is a player apart,’ he said. ‘When I signed him, I thought I had signed a good player, but I didn’t think he would make such an impact. He’s capable of providing moments of inspiration that we haven’t had in the British game for years. He inspires people around him. He changes his way of playing in different games; he has the intelligence to understand the tactical part. Perhaps this club, this stadium, is what he has always needed.’ Many years later, in 2005, Ferguson told me how Éric had exceeded his expectations, becoming one of those players ‘who do what can’t be taught, who, in fact, teach you something you didn’t know about football, and can’t be learnt, because you had no idea it existed before they did it’. That’s as good a definition of greatness as the one I heard from Ferguson’s arch-rival Arsène Wenger: ‘A player who receives the ball has to solve a million problems within a fraction of a second; a great one is the one who chooses the right solution.’ Éric at his best fitted the description more often than not.

  All of the United ‘family’ adopted him as one of their own, the painting, poetry and psychoanalysis notwithstanding. Cantona didn’t mind his teammates making gentle fun of him, as when he attempted to buy a packet of chewing-gum with his gold credit card in an airport (Éric hardly ever carried cash on his person). His English was, of course, far better than the media thought, and the more industrial the language, the better he fared. Alex Ferguson encouraged the burgeoning comradeship between the Frenchman and the rest of the squad, making sure he took part in club-organized outings, with unexpected consequences at times. In late 2008 Sir Alex recounted, at a lunch to celebrate Cristiano Ronaldo’s Ballon d’Or, how on one of these team-bonding exercises (at a racecourse), a group of Liverpool supporters positioned on the balcony overlooking the box reserved for Manchester United relieved themselves on the players below. ‘Cantona got up, furious, and started to punch everyone in sight – he took twenty guys on his own! The whole team followed him afterwards, but he’d started on his own . . .’

  Such behaviour demanded respect and got it. He had truly become ‘one of the lads’, someone Roy Keane described as ‘funny, [someone who] loved a drink, champagne rather than Heineken’, and ‘good company’, ‘one of the best, no real conceit, no bullshit’. Éric would sometimes join the young Irishman and others like Lee Sharpe on one of their sessions in pubs like the Griffin and the Stanford, far enough away from the city centre (the Griffin is located in Altrincham) to avoid trouble-seekers. Éric occasionally patronized venues closer to the heart of the city too, like the Peveril of the Peak, where Pete Boyle met him for the first time on 1 March 1994. ‘I was with my mates upstairs,’ Pete told me, ‘rehearsing “Éric the King” . . . then someone came up and said, “You’ll never guess who’s downstairs.” It was Éric, playing table football with Claude Boli, who was doing an MA in Manchester at the time. I showed him the lyrics to my song, after which we all went to Boli’s house, which Éric used to visit regularly – just behind the Kippax’ – the legendary stand of Manchester City’s now-demolished Maine Road stadium.

  Manchester’s seediness appealed to Éric, as the French journalists who visited him around this time could testify. He would sometimes show them round some of the less salubrious places where he would have a drink or – an obsession – play or watch snooker. My France Football colleague Patrick Urbini (to whom Éric would later say: ‘I piss on your arse’ live on French television, but that is a different story) told me how, on one such occasion, having been promised ‘the best bar on the planet’, he found himself in a nondescript public house in a nondescript housing estate. Judging by how relaxed the habitués were in Cantona’s company, it was obvious that this wasn’t Éric’s first visit. When the time came to leave the pub and head back to his car, it was to find out that vandals had broken one of the windows and run away with the radio. Cantona shrugged his shoulders, as if this were a pretty unremarkable occurrence in the life of a Manchester United footballer. And maybe it was. In any case, it showed that Éric’s indifference to material belongings was not just pretence. To him, money was a gauge of the appreciation of others, to be earned in great quantity if at all possible, certainly, but also to share; and many friends and former teammates were either the witnesses or the beneficiaries of one of his acts of generosity.

  Roy Keane has told how, one day, Steve Bruce arrived with a cheque for £15,000 – the players’ royalties for a Manchester United video; but no one could quite work out how this sum should be divided between the eighteen players. It was agreed to hold a draw. Whoever’s name first came out of the hat would pocket the money – all of it – unless some preferred to receive their eighteenth of the sum and not to take part in the lottery. Most of the younger players, for whom this £800 represented a small fortune, opted for the safer solution. Two of them (Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt) decided to try their luck. Éric won – but came in the next morning with two cheques for the losers: their reward for taking the gamble, he explained. ‘This was Éric to a “t”,’ Keane told his biographer, ‘the unexpected, a touch of class, also an appreciation of the plight of two young lads more in need of money than himself.’

  A father-like manager who played him every week and stood by him in public, teammates who sought his company but also respected his need for solitude, a city he had learned to love, a winning team, supporters who had crowned him ‘King’ of Old Trafford, the captaincy of the national side, not forgetting a wife and child whom he could visit when it pleased him, money, fame . . . It’s easier to draw up a list of the things that Éric Cantona didn’t have than the things he did. Yet his inner turmoil hadn’t abated, that fire that sometimes caused him ‘to do harm to himself, and to others’.

  One of these ‘others’ was John Moncur, the Swindon midfielder who had the misfortune to become tangled with Éric after an untidy tackle. Cantona reacted by donkey-kicking him in full view of referee Brian Hill. It was his first straight red card in England; it could have been his fifth in any other league on the Continent since the beginning of the year. Once more playing with ten men, United surrendered their 2–1 lead and left the County Ground with a single point. An incandescent Ferguson told Éric to ‘fucking sort himself out’, for the player’s dismissal for violent conduct carried an automatic three-game ban, which would rule Cantona out of the FA Cup semi-final. What’s more, Kenny Dalglish’s Blackburn showed no sign of tiring as the final straight loomed into view: they won 2–1 at Sheffield Wednesday the following day, on 20 March, to cut their deficit to a mere five points.

  And it got worse. Arsenal were next in line for United. The score-line was identical: 2–2, and Éric was sent off again, this time for two bookable offences. He could consider himself hard done by. The referee, Viv Callow, had first punished him for a fairly innocuous (in the context of an ill-tempered game) challenge on Ian Selley, when a horrendous tackle by Paul Ince on the same player had only resulted in a free kick earlier in the match. Within four minutes of receiving this caution, Cantona was ordered off the pitch: Tony Adams had been his target this time. In hindsight, Alex Ferguson probably wished that Aimé Jacquet had not been so understanding of United’s needs that he had left his captain out of the national squad – France played a friendly against Chile in Lyon on the very same day. The Scottish manager had had enough. Schmeichel, Ince, Robson, Keane, Bruce, Hughes and Cantona (all of them ‘capable of causing a row in an empty house’, according to Ferguson) were summoned to his office to be given the famous ‘hairdryer’ treatment. Once the expletives had been deleted, the speech he gave could be summed up in two words: ‘no more’.

  ‘Our disciplinary record lurched towards the unacceptable,’ Ferguson later said, falling short of admitting that it was his players’ indefensible behaviour rather than their ‘disciplinary record’ which was the cause of United’s difficulties, not so subtly deflecting the blame towards intransigent referees. That 1993–94 side could produc
e football of quite breathtaking fluidity; I would argue that, in many respects, it was the strongest of all those assembled around Éric Cantona at Old Trafford, if only for the presence of Ince, a stupendous footballer who, when he joined Inter Milan at the end of that season, showed he was adept and skilful enough to play alongside the very best in what was at the time the most technically demanding league the world. Hampered by their inexperience and tethered by the restrictions on ‘foreigners’ put in place by UEFA, this group of players was unable to express itself fully in Europe. In England, however, they were irresistible at times. They were also shockingly brutal, confrontational and boorish, each one of them egging the other on to emulate their ‘manliness’ and, one imagines, deriving some perverse pride from finding their name written in the referee’s book. Manchester United fans might not like this, but of the great teams of the past, the one which came to mind when comparisons were drawn was Don Revie’s Leeds United, not Bob Paisley’s Liverpool. With this proviso: whereas Revie had a cynical hand in his side’s misdemeanours – according to some accounts, to the extent that his players were told before kick-off who should ‘take out’ whom, and how to ‘rotate the strike’ when intimidating a referee – Ferguson merely tolerated them. He would go so far as to exonerate one of his protégés’ misconduct when facing the press but, to his credit, addressed the issue of indiscipline in private. Bans harmed the team’s prospects, for one thing.

  The red mist didn’t dissipate immediately. Come the next game, on 27 March,38 it was Andreï Kanchelskis who left the field prematurely. His offence was tame in comparison with what had gone on before: a deliberate handball. Aston Villa, humiliated three months previously in the championship, were deserving victors (3–1) of the 1994 League Cup. Cantona, booed at every touch by the Villa supporters, was anonymous – it was as if he was already suspended, a prisoner waiting for the execution of his sentence. There would be no ‘historic treble’. A few days later, when Liverpool were beaten 1–0 at Old Trafford, Éric’s despondency had increased to such an extent that Alex Ferguson subbed him with twenty-five minutes to play, replacing him with the creaking Bryan Robson.

  The six-point lead that United enjoyed over Blackburn was halved at the beginning of April when Alan Shearer – one of Ferguson’s targets before Cantona was bought from Leeds – scored a brace for Rovers against the champions. With seven games to go, the prediction made by most at the turn of the year that United would ‘walk it’ began to look dubious in the extreme, particularly as Éric still had four games of his five-game ban to serve. As so often when he found himself on the periphery of the game, Cantona headed for Marseilles, where he retreated into the cocoon of his clan. The gloom of his mood was matched by the gloom of the Provençal skies: it rained almost incessantly while he was there. Ironically, it was then that he learned that his peers in the PFA – including the magnanimous John Moncur, whom he had assaulted on the field a few weeks previously – had voted him the Players’ Player of the Year on 11 April, the first foreigner to be deemed worthy of such an accolade.

  United stuttered in his absence, edging out Oldham 3–2 at home in the league, and six days later being rescued by Mark Hughes in the last minute of extra time in their FA Cup semi-final against the same tenacious Lancastrian opponents (1–1). They negotiated the replay with some panache, winning 4–1, but fell 1–0 at Wimbledon, which enabled Blackburn (who had played one game more) to join them at the top of the table. How much Cantona had been missed in these three weeks was shown as soon as he was allowed to resume competitive football. Éric’s returns from bans or injuries generally turned out to be spectacular occasions, of which he was invariably the focal point, and, once again, he didn’t disappoint. He dismantled Manchester City on his own, scoring both goals in a 2–0 victory.

  There had been much fighting talk emanating from the City camp before the encounter, some of it so excessive that their manager, Brian Horton, had felt obliged to exclude Terry ‘The Scuttler’ Phelan from his squad after the left-back had announced he had some ‘special treatment’ in store for the Frenchman. This didn’t prevent Horton from instructing Éric’s designated man-marker Steve McMahon to ‘get under [his] skin’, a piece of advice that the former Liverpool veteran appeared to have taken literally: he was yellow-carded in the fifth minute after his elbow had – just – failed to connect with Cantona’s face. Alex Ferguson had predicted that, should anyone intend to intimidate Éric, ‘he’d calm them down’, and this is what he did, taking advantage of fine work by Kanchelskis and Hughes to bring his tally to 22 goals in 43 games for the season. ‘Éric, no matter the tempo or the maelstrom of premier division football,’ Ferguson reflected, ‘has that ability to put the foot on the ball and to make his passes. That in itself is almost a miracle.’39

  Éric excelled once again four days later in Leeds, when the taunts of 41,000 baying Yorkshiremen inspired him to deliver one of his most complete performances on the Eiland Road pitch. United’s convincing 2–0 victory there helped them re-establish their supremacy in the league, as Blackburn had been held 1–1 at home by QPR three days before. United’s advantage was far more than the couple of points that now separated the last two challengers for the title: they still had a game in hand with three to play, and their vastly superior goal difference (+39 compared to +29 for Rovers) ensured that parity in terms of points sufficed to ensure triumph.

  On the most sombre day of that sporting year, 1 May, the day Ayrton Senna died on the Imola racetrack, another step was made towards the retention of the Premiership title when an ‘unsteady’ United prevailed 2–1 at Ipswich. Éric had headed the equalizing goal, his 18th in that league campaign, his 23rd in all competitions. Twenty-four hours later, pressure finally got the better of a nerve-racked Blackburn, who were stopped 2–1 in Coventry. As in 1992–93, Manchester United had been crowned without playing, when many had thought that the race would last just a little while longer: Alex Ferguson, for one, was watching snooker on television when his son Jason called him with the news that Coventry had opened the scoring. Steve Bruce, the side’s captain, couldn’t bear the tension and left his home in search of some champagne. Éric savoured his fourth consecutive national title with more calm than most: he had long been convinced that nothing could stop ‘the best team he’d ever played for’.

  The Old Trafford crowd cheered their champions on 4 May when Southampton were beaten 2–0 at Old Trafford. This was a red-letter day in more ways than one, as Arsenal won the European Cup Winners Cup at the expense of Parma that evening. Arsenal’s success had sufficiently boosted the UEFA rating of English club football to guarantee that Manchester United would enter the following season’s competition directly in the group phase – probably the only time in the history of the Gunners that they did a good turn to their bitterest rival in the north-west of England.

  There remained an FA Cup final to play, whose outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion, despite United’s remarkable statistics in this 1993–94 season: 64 games played in all competitions, 126 goals scored, and only 6 defeats. But their opponents Chelsea had ‘done the double’ over them in the league. The whole of Manchester, however, had another double in mind – this one with a capital ‘D’, which only five clubs had achieved since the creation of the Football League in 1888.40 United were favourites to become the sixth team, and Cantona the first non-British footballer, to achieve a feat that many had considered impossible in the context of the modern game. Other foreigners had walked up Wembley’s thirty-nine steps to receive a FA Cup winner’s medal: the Argentinian duo of Osvaldo Ardiles (1981 and 1982) and ‘Ricky’ Villa (1981), both with Tottenham; much earlier, the Newcastle inside-forward Jorge ‘George’ Robledo Oliver (in 1951 and 1952), a Chilean international who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, as his parents had emigrated to Yorkshire when he was five years old. But none had yet finished a domestic season with the two greatest honours English football had to offer.

  Six days before the final, Éric and his
teammates did a last lap of honour in their own stadium. Or should it be a stroll of honour? Their opponents that day, Coventry City, had long secured their Premiership status, and Alex Ferguson could afford to give a rare outing to a few fringe players, Dion Dublin among them. The 0–0 scoreline didn’t surprise or upset anyone. Éric did his best to provide some entertainment, his bicycle kick forcing Steve Ogrizovic to produce a flying save, one of only two occasions when the crowd rose to its feet; the other was to give a standing ovation to Bryan Robson, who was wearing United’s red shirt for the 340th and last time. The Cantona clan had travelled en masse from Marseille for an extended stay, Albert (whose 54th birthday fell on Cup final day) cramming the boot of his car with memorabilia purchased at the club’s store, Léonor listening to her son re-enacting his on-field acrobatics, all of them thinking ahead to 14 May, the date of Éric’s fifth visit to Wembley,41 but the first on which the most venerable trophy in world football would be at stake. Joël, as ever, was in adoring attendance.

  Cantona slept badly on the eve of the final. Nerves were not to blame, but a recurrence of the back trouble that had been a bane of his career for so long. He usually played through the pain, but the stiffness was such when he woke up that he asked for painkillers before the teams walked out on the pitch. United’s medical staff decided against an injection and provided him with three tabs of aspirin instead, which turned out to be remarkably effective on the evidence of his performance that afternoon. Mindful of his condition, he produced a display that was composed rather than flamboyant, controlling the play from a slightly more withdrawn position, finding space on the right wing at times, sustaining a high tempo through quickness of thought and breadth of vision, happy for Giggs, Hughes, Kanchelskis and the marauding Irwin to harry Chelsea’s defence.