Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  This minuscule company had come up with the idea of collecting Cantona’s best sallies in a volume titled La Philosophie de Cantona, gathering the material from a number of public sources, including the English-language version of Éric’s autobiography. The publishers of that book, Headline, had not given their consent, however. Nor had Manchester United, and the owners of Ringpull Press had no choice but to stop the distribution of La Philosophie, remove the passages which amounted to a breach of copyright, and add the club’s logo to the book’s cover. The revised edition went into production, with a print run of 30,000 copies. It is at that moment that Éric’s lawyers were instructed to act. His agents objected to the picture of their client used on the dust jacket: a beret and a goatee beard had been added to Cantona’s face. Ringpull had to take its book off the shelves, and the company collapsed.

  18

  The relief of scoring.

  THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE: JANUARY–MAY 1996

  ‘I should have been born English. When I hear “God Save the Queen” it can make me cry, much more than when I hear “La Marseillaise”. I feel close to the rebelliousness and vigour of the youth here. Perhaps time will separate us, but nobody can deny that here, behind the windows of Manchester, there is an insane love of football, of celebration and of music.’

  Éric Cantona committed suicide in January 1996 in a Manchester hotel room. But none of the three people present – Éric, Aimé Jacquet and Henri Émile – remembers precisely when the trigger was pulled. Émile’s only recollection is that some time towards the end of that month, a few days before France beat Portugal 3–2 in a friendly, he and the manager of Les Bleus made a rare joint visit to England. As Manchester United played (and won 1–0, Éric scoring the winner) at West Ham on the 22nd, and the French were in action forty-eight hours later in Paris, the meeting must have taken place just before the game at Upton Park. But it is impossible to be more precise than that. Jacquet had a proposal for Éric, who hadn’t played for France since he captained the side to a 1–0 defeat of the Netherlands on 18 January 1995, one week before the events at Crystal Palace. The fortunes of the national team had improved significantly in Cantona’s absence. Three of the four Euro qualifiers that had been played before his suspension had ended in goalless draws.51 Since then, France had taken wing with four wins in six games, including a crucial 3–1 away victory in Romania, scoring twenty goals and conceding only two along the way. Jacquet, however, was distraught at the idea of not taking Éric along to the 1996 European Championships in which his team had now earned a place. In Émile’s words, leaving Cantona out ‘would be to inflict hurt on the man who’d been the first to join the adventure’. But others had stepped into the breach since then. Jacquet couldn’t ignore the idea that France was close to finding a new, intriguing balance, thanks to the emerging genius of Zinédine Zidane and to the understanding the Bordeaux playmaker had developed with PSG’s Youri Djorkaeff.

  Both were consistent goalscorers, but neither operated within the conventional parameters of centre-forward play. They drifted, looked for space and angles of attack which were strikingly modern (in that they did away with the idea of a focal point, a point de fixation in the forward line, years before teams like Spalletti’s AS Roma and Ferguson’s post-Van Nistelrooy’s United showed that penetration and success didn’t depend on the presence of an old-style predator). The lack of a ‘natural-born killer’ in French football at that time forced Jacquet’s hand to an extent. Jean-Pierre Papin (then 31 years old, and playing the last of his two seasons at Bayern Munich) would have been a shoo-in had it not been for recurrent knee injuries that rendered him largely ineffectual. No obvious replacement was available, although quite a few were tried – and found wanting. The names of Patrice Loko, Nicolas Ouédec and Mikaël Madar (one of France least successful exports to England, where he spent a forgettable season with Everton in 1997–98) were unlikely to strike fear in France’s opponents. Stéphane Guivarc’h’s colossal work-rate will always come second to the strange fact that as the designated lone striker of the French team, he didn’t score a single goal in their victorious 1998 World Cup campaign.

  Jacquet, quite reasonably, worried that making space for Cantona would slow down his team’s impetus; he couldn’t upset his system to accommodate a particular player. Éric, until his moment of folly, had been deployed as an attacking midfielder in a fluid version of the manager’s favoured 4-4-2, in which the two centre-forwards frequently sought out space on the flanks, creating a ‘free zone’ in the middle of the pitch. Cantona could glide there naturally, as if sucked in by their lateral movement. But France lacked strikers of proven international class, and had evolved towards a 4-3-2-1 formation which revolved around the combined skills of Djorkaeff and Zidane and their talent for improvisation. The front player they moved behind would hustle the opposition’s central defenders, a kind of advanced ‘water-carrier’ who was expected to disrupt the back line and create holes for others to exploit. This tactical formation could look frustratingly negative when the two fantasistas were not on song; when they were (which was most of the time) the music they made together was ravishing, and extremely effective. Jacquet had no desire and no reason to disrupt that harmony. He had never closed the door on Cantona (or Ginola, for that matter, who was captivating crowds in England with Newcastle). Earlier that month, he’d told journalists that ‘they [were] players of international calibre’ whom he couldn’t ‘cut out’. ‘All will depend on their output between now and the tournament,’ he explained. Some thought Jacquet was paying lip-service to public opinion and nothing more, as Cantona’s estrangement from the national squad had developed into a matter of national debate in France. Éric’s exploits (and rehabilitation) with Manchester United hadn’t gone unnoticed, to say the least, up to the point that they fed yet more rumour-mongering when news of his exclusion from the national squad was broken in May 1996. What Cantona’s supporters didn’t know was that it was Éric himself who refused the hand Jacquet held out to him.

  ‘Neither Aimé nor myself thought that what happened at Crystal Palace would signify the end for Éric as a French national team player,’ Émile told me. ‘The events meant that he took himself out of the team because of his ban. And the team was winning without him. Still, Aimé had an idea. When Éric came back after his eight-month suspension, we had qualified for Euro 96. As a manager, should Aimé question what had been positive and ensured qualification? Should he yield to the pressure of the media which lobbied for Éric to return in the role he’d played before, as skipper, playmaker and orchestrator from midfield? Or should he do something which meant evolving from the set-up we’d put in place?’ After a great deal of soul-searching, Jacquet decided to gamble: he would ask Cantona to return to the fold. And on that evening in Manchester, he did.

  The coach’s decision was not solely motivated by Éric’s superb performances in the Premier League. Euro 96 would take place in England; what’s more, should they qualify for the latter stages of the tournament, France were likely to play at Old Trafford.52 With Cantona on the field, the French could count on the support of the largely Mancunian crowd, as foreign fans were not expected to travel in large numbers to a country still seen as a hotbed of hooliganism. Jacquet explained to Cantona that France would carry on playing as they had done in the previous months, adding that they needed a centre-forward. He then put the question to Éric.

  ‘Do you want to be that player?’

  ‘Éric said no, straight away,’ Émile recalls. But Cantona, who seemed ‘strangely distant’, didn’t offer any explanation for his refusal. Shaken but undeterred, Jacquet told him that he would ‘draw the consequences he [needed] from this’, but that under no circumstances could he envisage having Éric Cantona as a mere substitute. However, should Zidane or Djorkaeff be unavailable for one reason or another, could he count on him? Éric made no reply. Jacquet put the question to him again and, at the third time of asking, an answer finally fell from Cantona’s lips
. ‘You can count on me,’ he said, ‘but you’ll have to call me beforehand, so that we can talk it over.’

  Now in his 75th year, Émile still spends a great deal of time with Cantona through his involvement with the French beach-soccer team, which Éric took to the world title as a manager in May 2005. He has tried to get to the heart of Cantona’s incomprehensible froideur that night on a number of occasions, but his repeated enquiries get short shrift every time. ‘Éric says he can’t remember much of what happened then,’ he told me disbelievingly. ‘If he’d agreed to be in the team, he’d have been in the starting eleven, and we could have been European champions – as we lost on penalties in the semi-finals.’ He could also have carried on to the 1998 World Cup, been part of the unit that beat Brazil 3–0 in an unforgettable final, and silenced all the detractors who single out the absence of any international honour at senior level in his collection of trophies to deny him footballing greatness. But he said no. He turned his back on the greatest chance he’d been given in his whole career, as if it were meant to be that way. But it wasn’t. He chose not to have a last opportunity to fail. Why? It couldn’t be because the position didn’t appeal to him any more: he had occupied it for Manchester United regularly, as he had done at Auxerre and Marseille, and would do so again in his last season in England. Had the ‘fear of losing’ that he claimed was his greatest motivation to play finally overwhelmed him? Was he scared to be found wanting as he had been in 1992?

  Not once has he mentioned the reasons behind his decision to walk away from France in the numerous interviews he’s given since then. Only a very small number of people have been aware – until now – that it could and probably should have been Éric Cantona and not Patrice Loko or Stéphane Guivarc’h who led France’s attack not just at Euro 1996, but at the 1998 Mondiale too. Cantona himself did little to silence those who muttered that Jacquet had been obeying ‘orders from above’ to leave him by the wayside. Later that year, he took advantage of a guest appearance on a popular French TV programme to criticize the omission of his and Jean-Pierre Papin’s names from the Euro 96 squad. ‘I’m still available,’ he insisted. ‘[The French football authorities] would be very happy if I said I wasn’t.’ The ‘Cantonians’ (Bernard Morlino among them) went further: many of them still argue that their hero was shunned because he was under contract with Nike, not Adidas, the French team’s official sponsor. This is utter nonsense. In fairness, Cantona himself toned down his criticism over time. In 2007 he said that he ‘understood Jacquet’s decision [to leave him out]’, adding this telling caveat, ‘in a wider context’. ‘My eight-month ban had allowed a new generation to claim their place,’ he told L’Équipe Magazine, ‘and they were winning. It was normal that they should stay.’ But Cantona didn’t stop at this magnanimous comment. He added: ‘I think I could’ve played. Sincerely, I could have played just as much as Stéphane Guivarc’h did, couldn’t I? I feel like I’m belittling myself when I say that. To quote Charles Bukowski, “Truth is evidence that no one tells.”’

  Hadn’t Guivarc’h played as a centre-forward? The real truth is that Éric froze at the precise moment when he was called back in. His reluctance to admit it, his lapses of memory, speak of a fragile man who will forever carry ‘the greatest regret of his career’ (that much he has confessed, speaking of his missing out on two extraordinary years in the history of the French national team) as if it had happened to someone else. If retiring, for a footballer, is ‘a kind of death’, the cause of it in Éric’s case was not murder. ‘You cannot go against the choice of such a player,’ Émile told me, ‘and only Éric could tell you why he made that choice.’ But Éric left no suicide note.

  No Euro 96 meant no World Cup. It also meant that Cantona could never exorcize the demons of November 1993, never know what could have been; he would remain, for ever, the nearly man of a nearly team. He would play on through the remaining year-and-a-half of his career with no hope of doing for France what his hero Diego Maradona had done for Argentina in 1986, and been so close to doing in 1990 and 1994. ‘[If I had been selected by France for Euro 96], with the World Cup in 1998, I would certainly not have stopped in 1997,’ he confessed much later, in April 2007. ‘And if we’d won the European Cup with Manchester that year, maybe I’d have carried on too.’ But isn’t it significant that he himself has never spoken publicly about his conversation with Jacquet, that, even in private, he claimed not to remember a word of it? It’s tempting to see in this denial of one of the most pivotal decisions in his life a desire to stamp out the vertigo that must have engulfed him when Jacquet and Émile left his hotel room. And then, as if freed from an unbearable weight, he devoted himself to the cause of Manchester United, and did for them what he had made sure he couldn’t do for France: be the architect of victory.

  There seemed to be no hope of catching up with the runaway leaders, Newcastle, who were twelve points ahead of their nearest pursuers Liverpool at that stage, and were now rumoured to have captured one of Serie As most potent attackers, Parma’s Colombian Faustino Asprilla. United themselves trailed in third after their 1–0 victory at West Ham, sending a mixed message to their supporters. Once again, they had finished with ten men after Nicky Butt received two yellow cards, and had Éric to thank not just for a stupendous winning goal, scored from a very acute angle, but also for defusing an ugly confrontation between Julian Dicks and Roy Keane which could have led to further dismissals. His convict’s hairstyle may have made him look more threatening than ever, but his peacemaking role earned a few admiring comments in the Monday papers. There was also the confirmation that Manchester United’s reliance on their French talisman was growing by the game. He was again a central figure in a brutal dismantling of first division Reading (3–0) in the fourth round of the FA Cup, in which the only surprise was to see the psychic Uri Geller practise one of his spoon-bending tricks on Bobby Charlton and Cantona’s father Albert, who had come on one of his increasingly numerous Éric-watching trips to England.

  Albert was in the stands again on 3 February, the guest of honour of Wimbledon’s chairman Sam Hammam, to see his son return to Selhurst Park a year and a week after the infamous game against Crystal Palace. United won at a stroll (4–2), with Éric at the heart of every single one of their attacks – Éric wearing the captain’s armband after Steve Bruce, his forehead badly gashed, had been forced to leave the field. The first of his two goals was as exquisite in its conception – a bewildering exchange of passes with David Beckham – as it was brave in its execution, as defender Chris Perry had raised his boot to reach the ball when Cantona headed it. He then rounded off the scoring with a penalty, and the Dons’ manager Joe Kinnear joined the long list of English coaches who had praised their chief tormentor. ‘He’s got everything that’s great about a player,’ he gushed. ‘He drifts in, ghosts in and out, making it almost impossible to do anything about him. Some say he’s a lesser player since he came back, but I can’t see that.’

  Manchester United had played their last four games away from home, and won them all, Éric scoring four times. The pattern for the rest of the season had been established. Cantona had, it seemed, made a vow to himself. I do not choose the word ‘vow’ at random. His tonsure and his silence in public had a quasi-monastic quality. There was a sense of a man inhabited by a kind of ferocious but controlled anger, of a zealot bent on redressing an injustice and imposing a greater truth. Nothing would stand in his way, certainly not Blackburn, who were next on his list of victims. Of the seven chances United created in 90 minutes, he was involved in five, including that which led to Lee Sharpe’s winning goal. Then Manchester City were disposed of 2–1 in the fifth round of the FA Cup. Once again, he had made the difference in one of the tightest Mancunian derbies in recent years, which United might well have lost had it not been for a controversial equalizing penalty, awarded by that man Alan Wilkie for a foul by Michael Frontzeck on, who else, Éric Cantona. City’s left-back wrapped both his arms around Cantona’s shoulders, the w
histle blew to the bafflement of both culprit and victim, which didn’t prevent the victim from turning executioner with his customary efficiency.

  United’s ferocious rhythm did not slacken: Everton – fielding the traitor’ Andreï Kanchelskis, who was booed relentlessly on his return to Old Trafford – lost 2–0, Cantona having a hand in both goals. On 25 February it was Bolton’s turn to face Éric’s wrath. United eviscerated their hosts 6–0, Cantona walking off the pitch to be replaced by Paul Scholes (who scored a brace) with 15 minutes to go: the job had already been done, and Ferguson could give his star player a rest. This was United’s eighth victory on the trot in all competitions, their fifth in the Premier League, and the tremendous pressure applied by their challengers started to have a telling impact on Newcastle. A couple of disappointing results in late February (a 2–0 defeat at West Ham, and a 3–3 draw at Manchester City) had seen their lead dwindle to four points. They had a game in hand, however, and would have an opportunity to blunt United’s chances in the very next game. Alex Ferguson and Kevin Keegan were to come head to head on 4 March at St James’ Park, in one of the most anticipated top-of-the-table clashes one could remember. The two French outcasts, David Ginola and Éric Cantona, would also resume their game of one-upmanship in English football. Should Newcastle win, the title, their first since 1927, would become a near certainty.

  Keegan stuck to his principles of blitzing the opposition from the outset, fielding an ultra-attacking side which included just the one all-out defensive midfielder (Éric’s former Leeds teammate David Batty, who was making his debut for the Magpies) to United’s two, Roy Keane and Nicky Butt. Ginola, Asprilla and Peter Beardsley could be relied on to provide the ammunition for their powerful centre-forward Les Ferdinand, who tested Peter Schmeichel twice in the first half. Little was seen of Cantona in that first 45 minutes: his own midfield had been too busy trying to soak up Newcastle’s offensives to supply him with decent service. How much this was part of Alex Ferguson’s pre-match strategy is impossible to say. It may have been that he had instructed his team to work the ball like an opening batsman on a tricky pitch: block, and block again, wait for the bowlers to tire, then open your shoulders. This they did five minutes after the resumption and, inevitably, it was Cantona who applied the decisive stroke. Phil Neville found himself on the left of Newcastle’s penalty area and lobbed a cross towards the far post, where Éric was lurking on the six-yard line, free of any marking. He met the ball with a solid right-foot volley which hit the turf before beating Pavel Srníek’s dive. Silence engulfed St James’ Park. There would be no way back for Newcastle, not in that game anyway. They were still one point ahead with a game in hand, but fear had chosen its camp.