Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  As he wrote in his diary, ‘My initial feeling was for letting Éric go. I felt that this time the good name of Manchester United demanded strong action. The club is bigger than any individual.’ But Ferguson realized how much Cantona had contributed to making it ‘big’ again.

  ‘I then thought about a call a friend had given me on our way back from London [as Ferguson was driving home from Manchester airport]. We were thinking about what we could do about the media hullabaloo and the punishment that would follow. He told me: “You remember our chat about John McEnroe? I explained to you that Éric and him are the same. John exploded on court, insulted referees, swore against himself. But, off the court, he can be charming. Éric is the same. This guy is fantastic. Don’t give up, Alex!”’ This friend was a lifelong supporter of Manchester United, Sir Richard Greenbury who held the positions of chief executive and chairman of Marks & Spencer plc from 1988 till 1999. Ferguson reassured the businessman. He wouldn’t let Cantona down.

  ‘The next day,’, he went on to tell L’Équipe Magazine, ‘at breakfast, I told everybody: “We’re backing Éric. He’s our player. The FA mustn’t have his skin. He made a mistake. We all make mistakes.” Éric knew I was on his side. He knew he could count on me. He needed someone to help him, someone whom he could trust, who’d support him. I fulfilled this mission.’

  And how. As Roy Keane later told Eamon Dunphy: ‘I don’t think any other football man would have demonstrated the skill, resolve and strength that Alex Ferguson did managing the Cantona affair.’

  What Ferguson didn’t say is that, shortly after the final whistle, referee Wilkie saw an apoplectic Manchester United manager storm into his dressing-room. ‘It’s all your fucking fault! If you’d done your fucking job this wouldn’t have happened!’ According to Ferguson’s biographer Michael Crick, a policeman had to intervene to stop the stream of abuse and drag the incensed Scot out of the referee’s quarters. In many instances, Ferguson’s tirades directed at anything that represents the FA’s authority, and particularly referees, have been little more than what the tabloids are fond of calling ‘mind games’, attempts to intimidate officials to gain the upper hand in matches to come. But not in this case. Over the preceding season-and-a-half, his players had stepped over the line with alarming regularity – and viciousness. Manchester United, arrogant Manchester United, ran the risk of earning a reputation for gamesmanship and brutality that would alienate the rest of the footballing world. Other sides (Don Revie’s Leeds United springs to mind) had paid a heavy price for such a reputation; Ferguson was aware of that and, despite a well-documented dressing-down of the worst culprits a year before, had failed to throw enough water on the fire raging in his dressing-room. Wilkie bore the brunt of his anger, in the absence of a better target. Ferguson had yet to see Lindsell’s photograph that would be on every front page a few hours hence. But, instinctively, he knew. This would be a crisis of enormous, preposterous proportions.

  Were there any mitigating circumstances to Éric’s moment of madness? Maybe. Ferguson was puzzled enough to have his player tested for hypoglycemia, after a doctor had suggested to him that a low level of glucose in the bloodstream might have triggered the explosion. The test failed to show any proof that this had been the case. More to the point, no one knew at the time that Éric’s father Albert had been laid low by a very serious viral infection, which, according to Guy Roux, could have had serious consequences, and had obviously caused tremendous anxiety within the family. As a result, the head of the clan had to be hospitalized in Marseilles for several weeks at the time of the incident. Éric, however, never sought to make an excuse of this. ‘I didn’t really analyse the situation until the day afterwards,’ he said in 2007. ‘I didn’t know what had happened, and what was going to happen. I wasn’t aware of much. One thing was for sure: I wasn’t proud of myself The hooligan who told me: “French son of a whore”, I’d heard him 50 billion times. On that day, I didn’t react like I’d reacted on other occasions. Why? I’ve never found an answer to this myself.’

  Shocking as Cantona’s actions had been, no one could have predicted the near hysteria that swept over the whole country within a few hours of the BBC opening its news bulletin with images of a crazed Éric ploughing into the crowd. Every publication in England seemingly tried to outdo the others in their zeal to condemn Cantona. What he had done was ‘scandalous’, ‘unforgivable’, ‘unprecedented’. Had not Chief Superintendent Terry Collins, who was in charge of security at the match, said: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it!’, adding that ‘There could have been a riot’ for good measure?

  In truth, Cantona was not the first sportsman to administer rough justice to a foul-mouthed heckler. In the early 1930s ‘Dixie’ Dean had walloped a fan who had insulted him – probably about the swarthy complexion to which he owed his nickname – at the end of an EvertonSpurs Cup game. A policeman stood nearby. Instead of escorting the great centre-forward to the station, he shook his hand, saying: ‘That was a beauty, but I never saw it.’ Playing before the age of television had its advantages. But there must have been cameras there when, in 1978, Birmingham City’s Alberto Tarantini tore into some of his own supporters at the end of a game against Manchester United. Nobody thought much of it, however, and no punishment ensued. Similarly, no action was taken against a rugby player named Gerald Cordle who, playing for Cardiff in 1987, brawled with a supporter of Aberavon Quins. But Dean, Tarantini and Cordle did not have the track record of Éric Cantona, and none of these offenders satisfied the criteria required to become a stereotype, which is what the Marseillais had been ever since he arrived in England; one of them played the gentlemen’s game, rugby, where physical violence is viewed with benignity, and is, even now, at least in the minds of some, perversely ennobled as proof of the competitors’ manliness.

  Ten years after the Heysel disaster, English football had developed an acute sensitivity to anything that could taint its efforts to purge the game of hooliganism. The outside world held even starker views on the periodic outbursts of brutality that still punctuated the football season. Cantona had not just kicked a thug; he had stirred demons that had not yet been put to sleep, he had twisted a blade in a seeping wound.

  By squaring up to a foreigner, English football could at least pretend it was ‘doing the right thing’ without tarnishing the new image it was creating for itself. It would have been far more difficult, and painful, to address two other incidents which took place on the very same night, and which went virtually unnoticed in the furore created by Cantona. Wimbledon manager Joe Kinnear escaped with a mere caution after verbally and physically abusing referee Mike Reed during a 2–1 defeat to Newcastle. Even more seriously, the Aston Villa goalkeeper, Mark Bosnich, committed, in my opinion, one of the worst premeditated assaults on an opposition player seen on a football field since Harald Schumacher nearly decapitated Patrick Battiston in a famed France-Germany World Cup semi-final, thirteen years previously. Bosnich, who had carelessly left his line, took out Tottenham’s Jürgen Klinsmann with a dreadful knees-first lunge that hit the German striker full on the head. Klinsmann, unconscious, had to be carried off on a stretcher and taken to hospital where, fortunately, no lasting damage was detected. Bosnich should have been red-carded and struck with a long ban. Instead of which he was allowed to continue playing, and was not even cautioned. The English press ran a couple of mildly outraged stories in the immediate aftermath of the assault, then promptly forgot it all. It had a far better target to aim at, and wasn’t short of volunteers to join in the very public execution of Éric Cantona.

  The squeaky-clean Gary Lineker opened the shooting season on the BBC’s Sportsnight with a toe-curling attempt at a ‘joke’: ‘He’s completely lost it, he lost les marbles.’ Microphones were put under the nose of past Manchester United legends, such as Alex Stepney (‘I’m absolutely disgusted that a man of his stature should lower himself to that. He shouldn’t play for United any more’), Bill Foulkes (‘Going into the crowd is b
ehaving like a hooligan – that’s nothing to do with sport. He lost control of himself, and that’s very sad to see . . . but Éric is French – they are different to us and he reacts differently’) and Shay Brennan (‘Sir Matt Busby would have hated anything like this’). The same sanctimonious tune was sung in near unison. In fairness, there were a few more measured comments too, such as Pat Crerand’s observation that it was ‘very difficult to make excuses for Éric, but the fan got off his seat and had a go at him. I wonder what all these guys in yellow coats [were] doing at Crystal Palace. Are they just along for a night out?’, a point of view echoed by Jimmy Greaves, who quite rightly wondered how it was that a couple of banknotes did not just buy a ticket, but also a licence to use the filthiest language imaginable with complete impunity.

  Discordant notes of this kind were not heard often, however, and were even more rarely amplified by the media; the fire under the story had to be stoked, even if it took dubious stunts to achieve it. Channel 4’s trashy The Word sent a dozen teenagers to sing ‘peace songs’ in Cantona’s drive. A young girl, encouraged by presenter Terry Christian, marched up to his house with a bunch of flowers. The door stayed shut, but Channel 4 had its story. The redtops tracked down the spectators who had been next to Simmons when he unleashed his verbal volley, turning one of them, hotel manageress Cathy Churchman (who had come to the game with her two children) into some sort of a celebrity (she turned down an invitation to be a guest on the prime-time TV show Kilroy as a result, and later became a sponsor of Crystal Palace FC). In the supposedly more reserved broadsheets, page upon page was devoted to new ‘insights’ into the troubled character of Cantona, to lengthy and error-ridden accounts of his past misdemeanours, cut-and-pasted from unchecked sources. For weeks, indeed for months, a torrent of words flooded the opinion columns as well as the front and back pages of every single paper in the country, without exception.

  Even the Daily Telegraph succumbed to Cantona fever, and in an astonishing way. It published two editorials on 28 January. The first was devoted to the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz; the second, in all seriousness, to Cantona’s troubles. It actually was a fine piece of writing, from which the conclusion is worth quoting: ‘It has been said that if he [Cantona] had kicked a Leeds or a Newcastle United fan during an away match, he would not have left the stadium alive. That, and not the loutish behaviour of one brilliant but errant player, indicates the deep-seated problem with football.’ But if the editorial deserved praise for its thoughtfulness, what could be said of the very idea of juxtaposing the Holocaust with ‘the loutish behaviour of one brilliant but errant player’? The notoriously prickly readers of the Telegraph didn’t complain, though. A number of them immediately removed Cantona from their Fantasy Football League teams (a story that made the front page of the daily), and that was that. The moral high ground is a comfortable place to occupy, and football correspondents slumped in their armchairs with ease.

  The ‘I-told-you-sos’ reminded their readers of how they had predicted that it would all end in tears. Stern headmaster types tuttutted with a hint of melancholy that the prodigiously gifted Frenchman had betrayed the trust his manager had placed in him. Nonetheless, Alex Ferguson had to shoulder some responsibility for his favourite player’s appalling disciplinary record. He had let Cantona get away with numerous breaches of the club’s code of behaviour, not out of weakness – most definitely not out of weakness – but because he was rightly convinced that there was no better way to guarantee his genius’s loyalty. The ‘Can-opener’ had to retain its sharpness. But it could cut both ways, and Ferguson must have known it. Among the many motives that lie behind his decision to support Éric through thick and thin over the coming months, a place should be found for an admission of partial guilt, and the desire to expiate it. Another, of course, and a far more potent one at that, was plain self-interest. The club’s former manager Tommy Docherty asserted that ‘Cantona should have been sacked by the club. United’s action is all about the perpetrator, not the crime.’ He bitterly recalled how he himself ‘had been sacked by Martin Edwards for falling in love with a beautiful lady’ whom he was still married to, two decades later, while ‘they closed ranks around [Cantona]’. Why? ‘Because the club sees money. You go to Manchester now, the shirts with his name on the back are flying out of the shops. They’ve made a martyr out of him.’

  More immediately, a Manchester United side deprived of its main attacking threat was far less likely to catch up with Blackburn Rovers, who still led the league. The stock exchange delivered its verdict (£3m was wiped off the club’s value the day after the incident, when the shares dropped 5p to £1.26), and the bookmakers agreed with it. They lengthened the odds for Ferguson’s team to retain its title from 7/2 to 9/2, joint favourites. Thirty-six hours after Cantona had been sent off, Graham Sharpe, a spokesman for William Hill, announced that not a single bet of £10 or more had been placed on United to win the FA Cup or the Premiership since the incident. In the light of the FA’s first statement (‘charges of improper conduct and of bringing the game into disrepute will inevitably and swiftly follow’), it was obvious that a lengthy ban was to be expected. But how long would it be?

  Manchester United hoped that, by acting quickly, they would be able to defuse the situation enough for the FA to resist the temptation of making an example of Cantona. The man in charge at Lancaster Gate, chief executive Graham Kelly, had led them to believe this could be the case when he faced the media on 26 January. ‘What happened was a stain on the game,’ he said. ‘If any offence is proved [sic], the player concerned is bound to face a severe punishment. The FA does not have the power to impose immediate suspension, but we have been in contact with Manchester United throughout the day and are confident that they will be responding in a proper manner.’ He carried on in that vein for a while, until his words felt less important than his willingness to repeat them ad nauseam. There was real menace behind the conciliatory tone of his message to the club. ‘I gave a clear indication at the start of the day that we expected Manchester United to come out strongly and unequivocally. We understand they are going to do that. We are confident that Manchester United will meet their responsibilities, not just to their own club, but to the widest interests of the game.’ Éric had by now been charged by the Football Association, and was given fourteen days to respond. What’s more, after two fans had made formal allegations of assault, he was also the subject of an investigation by Scotland Yard. The situation was already out of United’s control. A crash-landing couldn’t be avoided. All that could be hoped was that Éric would be a survivor when he could be pulled out of the wreck.

  The day passed with innumerable telephone conversations between Alex Ferguson, Martin Edwards and other members of United’s board. It was agreed to hold an emergency meeting in a luxury Cheshire hotel that night, at which Alex Ferguson was joined by all of the club’s top brass. Éric’s offence was serious enough to warrant an annulment of his contract, and some of the men present at Alderley Edge had initially felt that no other response could be envisaged, Alex Ferguson among them. One should keep in mind that football was a less forgiving environment then than it is now, when convicted thugs like Joey Barton are offered an unlimited number of ‘last chances’, despite breaking the game’s rules and the law of the land in far more disgraceful a fashion than Éric did. Soon, however, a consensus was reached in Cantona’s case. Financial considerations of the kind Docherty referred to may have played their part, although it was far too early in the scandal to guess that the club would, indeed, make millions out of its player’s plight and subsequent ‘redemption’. Manchester United would not please its rivals by sacking Éric in order to claim moral supremacy.

  The in-house trial of Éric Cantona became an exercise in damage limitation. United had to second-guess the FA’s intentions, and come up with a punishment that would be severe enough to earn the governing body’s respect in order to emerge from this unholy mess with the club’s reput
ation enhanced. Private encouragement was received from Lancaster Gate: should the club act in suitably decisive fashion, the FA would sanction its decision, and the matter would be laid to rest with as little fuss as possible. That, at least, is what United understood. Éric himself was completely unaware of what was happening 150 miles away, and behaved as if nothing had happened. While Isabelle and Raphaël were locked in their semi-detached Boothstown home, besieged by newspapermen and photographers, only opening the door to accept a bunch of flowers sent by an anonymous fan, he walked out through a explosion of flashbulbs, wearing an improbable jumper adorned with, among other things, skulls and bones, got into his Audi without a word, and made his way to United’s training ground. A few hours later, disbelieving shop assistants at the club’s megastore saw him buying a replica of his own shirt – complete with his name on the back – for his son. ‘He walked around as if he didn’t have a care in the world,’ one bewildered bystander said. This was, of course, a Cantona-esque way of showing the world that he, the son of Albert et Éléonore, was above all this nonsense. This display of calculated coolness under fire nearly landed him in serious trouble in the evening when, taking a stroll in Manchester city centre, upon leaving the bar of the Cornerhouse arts centre in the company of an unidentified friend, he came across six young men in suits, who started abusing him verbally in the street, quite violently, for several minutes. Cantona didn’t flinch, shrugged his shoulders, and walked back to the same bar, where he had a few more drinks, signing autographs for other customers with his usual good grace. ‘Whatever you may think, I can keep my nerve when I want to’, was the not-too-subtle message he had set out to communicate to others. Privately, though, he was fully aware of the gravity of his situation, and his nonchalant behaviour may well have been a means of reassuring himself that life, somehow, would carry on as before. It couldn’t, of course.