Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Éric had turned thirty in May, an age at which, today, most players opt for a lucrative last contract if they don’t opt out altogether. But football hadn’t yet become a young man’s game in 1996. A number of the Premiership’s most popular players were Cantona’s elders: Ruud Gullit (thirty-four), Chris Waddle (then with Bradford, thirty-five), Ian Wright (thirty-two), Gianluca Vialli (thirty-two), Stuart Pearce (thirty-four), not to mention most of the Arsenal back four, of course, or Teddy Sheringham, Éric’s almost exact contemporary, for whom life began at thirty. Still, Cantona paced himself as if he were five years older, choosing his games with great care when, six months earlier, he had thrown himself whole into every minute of every match and willed his team to two trophies. To quote a journalist who reported on a crucial 1–0 win over league leaders Liverpool in mid-October, Éric strove to ‘make himself invisible’. Alex Ferguson had his own theory to explain this disappearing act: now that he was no longer selected to play for his country, Cantona had to train on his own during the international breaks. This argument didn’t hold water. Éric had never been more influential, and inspired, than in the five months that preceded the Euro 96 tournament in which he had refused to take part. There is no doubt that the realization that he would never put the blue jersey on again – and that a new team was gelling into a tremendously dangerous unit before his very eyes, without him, their former captain – led him to withdraw into regrets he was too proud to confess. Like Maupassant’s character who, one evening, discovering white strands in his hair, mutters, ‘Finished,’ Cantona had to face his own mortality. But the lure of Europe still glowed in the near distance, fresh oxygen to feed a weakening fire.

  United were back in Istanbul on 16 October, the city where Bryan Robson and Éric had been roughed up by policemen and where United hadn’t scored in their two previous visits. Their opponents were not Galatasaray this time, but Fenerbahçe, whose fanatical support couldn’t prevent them from slumping to a 2–0 defeat. A beaming Ferguson told the press he now believed that ‘this team can go all the way in this competition’. Cantona’s display, one of his very best in the Champions League, gave substance to this profession of faith. Frequently dropping back to midfield to beat a steady tempo, United’s conductor helped create David Beckham’s goal and provided the finish for his side’s second. He had now scored five in fifteen European games.

  Then he sank, as did all around him. Four days after the elation felt in the Şükrü Saracolu Stadium, Newcasde blew United to smithereens at St James’ Park. Final score: 5–0 (and five bookings for the visitors, one of them for Éric, who reprised his private war with Philippe Albert that afternoon). This was Alex Ferguson’s worst-ever managerial defeat. United then folded abjectly at Southampton, shipping six goals and having Roy Keane sent off, as Cantona should have been for a nasty, cowardly kick at Ulrich van Gobbel, whose only crime was to have won the ball cleanly from him. Another, later foul earned Éric the yellow card he fully deserved. Fenerbahçe were next to exploit United’s frailty, winning 1–0 in Manchester. Never before had the Old Trafford crowd seen their team lose at home on a European night, and there had been 56 of these since United became the first English team to enter the European Cup, in the 1956–57 season. Strangely, Ferguson chose to play a 4-5-1 formation again. Cantona didn’t play in the hole: he vanished into one, and by the end of a woeful week, his team had dropped out of the Premiership’s top five. Chelsea took advantage of two bad mistakes by Peter Schmeichel to bring three points back from Old Trafford. Thankfully, another international break followed, giving Alex Ferguson a fortnight to reflect on his team’s current failings and prepare for their second game against Juventus.

  Éric looked refreshed by this period of rest, far sharper than he had been for a good while, awoken, perhaps, by the prospect of avenging the 1–0 defeat conceded at the Stadio delle Alpi in September. Arsenal, now managed by Arsène Wenger, lost in Lancashire – a fast, bruising affair in which Peter Schmeichel rediscovered his old authority. Juve, however, resisted United’s vibrant challenge and came out victors once more, again by a single goal. Éric himself had exerted close to no influence on the game. His timing had gone astray, and his temper too – he was booked for a typical ‘striker’s tackle’ on Bokši. Across the halfway line, he could see the man he had called a ‘water-carrier’ control space with unerring intelligence, winding Juve’s spring with simple, measured passes. But while Deschamps was magnificent, Cantona remained a spectator, gauche and ineffectual.

  By the time Leicester had been beaten 3–1, on 30 November, Cantona hadn’t scored in eight games. He looked heavy – he was heavy, close to 90 kilos. I’m examining a photograph taken at United’s next game, a 2–0 victory in Rapid Vienna’s Gerhard Hanappi Stadium. On the left, Ryan Giggs, perfectly balanced, hair flowing, is gliding past an Austrian defender while, two yards away from him, on the right, Cantona looks on. A huge Cantona, with the thighs of a weightlifter, a huge neck, a huge chin. He still exudes strength, but there is something awkward about him. No wonder people had started to talk about the ‘old Cantona’.

  This was, however, Éric’s best game for some considerable time. He played his part – as a lone striker, again – in setting up Giggs’s opening goal, when he went past Zingler with a delightful shimmy, and put the result beyond doubt when he was found by an impeccable David Beckham pass in the penalty box. But he couldn’t sustain that night’s excellence, sometimes a passenger, sometimes the pilot, often within the same match. He didn’t do much when United drew 2–2 at West Ham, but what he did, he did superbly, threading a peach of ball to send Solskjær in on goal when he noticed a fleeting moment of hesitancy in the Hammers back four, who were unsure whether they should use the offside trap as a weapon against the Norwegian striker. That was almost his only contribution to the game – but it had been decisive. Rarely, too rarely, he conjured a display of athleticism and elegance no other player – bar Dennis Bergkamp – could match in England, as when Sunderland, a gritty side which had drawn at Anfield and beaten Chelsea, were annihilated 5–0 three days before Christmas. He had already scored a penalty when, twelve minutes from time, he created one of his masterpieces. I’ve watched footage of this miraculous goal dozens of times, but the beauty of its execution still astonishes me. Just inside Sunderland’s half, harnessed by Ord and Ball, he set himself free with a stupendous double feint, somehow found McClair, who instantly returned the ball to him, which, still running, he chipped from 18 yards over the head of his former Nîmes teammate Lionel Perez. What is extraordinary is that Éric found a way to stop without stopping, slowing down imperceptibly to compose himself and brush the underside of the ball with his bootlaces, sending it to the only spot where the rushing ’keeper couldn’t reach it. The celebration was almost as memorable as the goal. Éric, affecting a haughty inscrutability, did nothing but straighten his back and puff out his chest, a Roman imperator savouring his triumph: all that was missing was David Beckham holding the laurels above his shaven head. Then Cantona broke into a beautiful smile, as if to say: ‘Did you see that one? Did you see?’ How could you not love such a player?

  True to that season’s pattern, Éric, having hit his stride, soon enough lost it. There was a superb volley in the 4–0 deconstruction of Nottingham Forest on Boxing Day, which shook the bar and offered Solskjær a chance he didn’t miss, and a successful penalty kick against Leeds, following a double one-two with United’s other telepathist, Ryan Giggs. But whereas Keane, still recovering from injury, was in and out of the side, Cantona was in and out of form, looking a spent force one day, a match-winner the next. Part of the problem was his obvious lack of complicity with Andy Cole, to whom he could hardly bring himself to pass the ball. The flicks and backheels did not find the intended player as often as before. United ‘stumbled to second top’ in the league, to quote Alex Ferguson, and, going for an unprecedented fourth straight appearance in the FA Cup final, struggled to get past a Tottenham side missing six first-team players in
the third round of that competition. The emergence of David Beckham counterbalanced Éric’s inconsistency to a degree, but United’s satisfactory position in the Premiership – only two points behind leaders Liverpool, after registering those three consecutive league defeats in the autumn – owed more to the feebleness of their challengers than to the quality of their own football. Newcastle, seductive but so fragile, hadn’t got over the trauma of the previous season’s sickening endgame, Blackburn were fading after the briefest of blossomings, and Arsenal were still in the process of being reinvented by Arsène Wenger. The rest? Mere fodder: Coventry (2–0), Wimbledon (2–1), Southampton (2–1, a double-chinned and unshaven Éric scoring the scrappy winner to end a scrappy game), three victories, nine points that made one feel like adding a verse to Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is?’.

  Cantona’s influence on the team was dwindling. The yellow cards he had accrued meant he missed two of that season’s pivotal games through suspension, a 2–1 win at Highbury and a 1–1 draw at Stamford Bridge. In both cases, what was noticed was that his absence was hardly noticeable; as was his presence when Wimbledon took United out of the FA Cup in a fourth round replay, on 1 February. This was the only defeat Éric ever suffered in this competition (an extraordinary statistic, as he had played his first FA Cup tie three years and a month previously), but, judging by his expression at the final whistle, he might as well have lost a friendly. He must have cared – he couldn’t help but care – but it didn’t show.

  In truth, Éric was already thinking of another future, of an existence beyond football. The international breaks had given him a chance to travel to Paris regularly over the past few months. He had become a familiar figure in the capital’s theatres, not just as a mere spectator, but also as a producer, in partnership with one of France’s finest stage and screen actors, Niels Arestrup, who had collaborated with arthouse directors such as Alain Resnais, Chantai Ackerman and István Szabó. Cantona was no neophyte in that regard. As early as 1989, he had helped launch the career of comedian Patrick Bosso, a fellow Marseillais who had actually played four years as a sweeper in OM’s under-18 team. Assisted by his brother Joël, whose role and influence were growing as Éric’s disenchantment with football deepened, he increased his involvement in Arestrup’s company, Caargo, both financially and emotionally. Their first common project had been a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Théâtre de la Gaîté Montparnasse in November 1996, which received excellent notices and did decent business at the box office. Éric then threw himself into the production of Derrière les collines, a play written by Jean-Louis Bourdon which had been passed on to the fledgling producer by the owner of a brasserie in the Opéra quarter, where Cantona happily mingled with a bohemian clientele of actors, writers and critics. ‘We never talked about football,’ Bourdon told me. ‘We talked about art. He was formidable, passionate, eager to listen to others, and so kind.’ The two men first met over dinner, where the playwright was delighted to welcome an unexpected guest at their table: the boxing legend Jake La Motta, Martin Scorsese’s ‘Raging Bull’ in person. Compare such charmed evenings with the privileged but humdrum life of a professional footballer: no wonder Éric often gave the impression he would rather be elsewhere when the time had come to don a jersey.

  Cantona’s ennui was nothing new: it had been his companion ever since he had signed his first contract with Auxerre. ‘It is better to live with your passions on the margins [of the football milieu] than to let yourself be eaten alive by this system,’ he said, long after he left it for good. French photographer Isabelle Waternaux – whose Géricault-like study of Cantona appears on this book’s dustjacket – told me how her subject had confessed he’d ‘had enough of this circus’ more than two years before his retirement. Sitting at the bar of the Novotel, a baseball cap screwed on his head in a vain and almost touching attempt to hide his identity, Éric told her how much he had come to despise the British press, how everything that was happening off the pitch encouraged him, if that’s the word, to think of another life for himself, away from what had made him a celebrity. ‘I have nothing to prove, and I have no duty to show who I am to the people whom I find interesting,’ he said, enigmatically, in the first interview he gave – to Libération – after his decision to leave England and football. ‘To the others – I have nothing to say.’

  Nothing to prove? Now that the 1998 World Cup would be played without him, there remained one aim to reach: victory in Europe, and that prospect alone was enough to make him find resources within himself that many believed were now exhausted. Éric Cantona had not given up – not yet.

  Manchester United’s opponents in their Champions League quarter-final were FC Porto, the first leg to be played at Old Trafford on 5 March. For Ferguson, this was the opportunity to exact revenge for the controversial defeat his Aberdeen side had suffered at their hands in the 1984 Cup Winners Cup, when allegations (which remain unsubstantiated) that the officials had been bribed surfaced shortly before the game. The ‘Dragons’ would be no pushovers, as their recent record in Europe’s top competition showed. Bobby Robson had led them to the semi-finals in 1993–94, further than United themselves had gone for twenty-nine years, and they had also reached the quarters of the Cup Winners Cup a season later. But Alex Ferguson’s team swept past the Portuguese champions that night: the 4–0 scoreline gave a fair reflection of the hosts’ dominance. This was one of the very few matches Éric played in Europe which could rank with his best performances in the league or the FA Cup. The consensus in the press box was that Porto had been torn to shreds by prospective European champions. The pounding rain hardly affected the fluidity of United’s passing. Cantonas goal, United’s second, was not a classic – a long punt upfield by Schmeichel, flicked on by Solskjær, bundled by Aloisio, thumped by Éric past a flailing Hilario – the same Hilario who made a few cameo appearances for Chelsea a decade later. On the hour, it was Cantona again who kindled United’s fire, addressing a slide-rule pass along the touchline to Andy Cole, who found Giggs, who scored. United’s last goal was also Éric’s creation. He cushioned a hopeful ball by Ronnie Johnsen, and found the exact millisecond at which he could release the ball into the path of Andy Cole, who finished off the move deftly with his left foot. ‘One of the best performances of my time,’ enthused Ferguson afterwards, ‘a hell of a performance.’ The following day the value of United’s stock rose £10m to £430m.

  As could be expected, the glorious winners fell back to earth when they had to resume their quest for the championship title. Sunderland picked up the pieces of a team suffering from a collective hangover and won 2–1. Éric barely looked interested.

  United’s play was the reflection of his own, and vice versa, exhilarating in fits and bursts (as when Éric found Cole in a packed penalty box with an exquisite pass for the first goal of a 2–0 victory over Sheffield Wednesday), otherwise ponderous, flat, uninspired. It’s true that they could afford to relax in the comfort of the Premiership, as no other team showed the talent or the drive required from would-be champions. Energy could be saved for the all-important European semi-final to come, after a demoralized Porto could only achieve a goalless draw in the second leg of a tie that had already been won in Manchester.

  Éric’s form in the games preceding the clash with Borussia Dortmund (who had seen off his old club Auxerre in the previous round) showed some improvement: even when Derby surprisingly won 3–2 at Old Trafford, he scored his second goal in two matches, following a nonchalant volley in a 2–0 win over a desperately poor Everton. Confidence was high in Manchester, so high that Peter Schmeichel made the quite ridiculous assertion that the current United team would beat the European champions of 1968 by 10 goals to nil. It didn’t bring him luck: he suffered an injury just before kick-off in Dortmund on 9 April, and had to leave his place in goal to Raymond van der Gouw. Alex Ferguson hadn’t been as reckless in his pre-match predictions, but had nonetheless brushed away suggestions that Cant
ona could struggle if the German champions man-marked him, as was expected, an apprehension that was shared by Gary Pallister. In the defender’s view, it was primarily the tighter man-marking practised by Continental teams that explained why Éric never really expressed himself fully in European competitions, rather than some flaw in his character. But Ferguson disagreed. ‘I don’t think Éric will be too worried about it,’ he said. The manager’s remarkable confidence was shared by most observers, with some justification. Dortmund, a fine side which had won two Bundelsiga titles on the trot, would be deprived of no fewer than seven of their regular first-teamers in the first leg, including the internationals Stéphane Chapuisat, Karl-Heinz Riedle and Jürgen Kohler, all of them injured, as well as their inspirational skipper Matthias Sammer, the future 1997 Ballon d’Or, who was suspended.

  Luck certainly didn’t smile on United in the awe-inspiring Westfalenstadion, packed with 48,500 vociferous supporters. René Tretschok’s late winner (scored a quarter of an hour from time) was deflected by Gary Pallister’s foot – after Nicky Butt, David Beckham and Cantona had all spurned good chances to score a crucial away goal. Éric had been sent clear by Butt, but from 15 yards, and with only Stefan Klos to beat, put his attempt high and wide. Then Butt (served by Cantona) hit a powerful shot which cannoned off the post. Finally, the Frenchman provided Beckham with an excellent ball on the hour, but the midfielder’s strike was too weak: Martin Kree had time to rush behind the beaten Klos and clear the ball off the line. United’s already wretched night took a turn for the worse when Roy Keane picked up yet another yellow card, which triggered an automatic ban for the return match, much to Cantona’s annoyance.

  The role Éric played in his team’s best three chances might suggest that he had been one of their best performers on the night, but this was not Keane’s judgement. The Irishman later told Eamon Dunphy that he felt Éric had been one of ‘the one or two of our players’ who had been ‘backing off’ on this occasion. He went further: ‘Éric will never rank alongside the truly great European players. This is the stage that really counts. Maybe Éric’s not capable of it. Never will be.’ Alex Ferguson was kinder to his protégé, but only marginally so. Cantona had been ‘so low-key and marginal in Dortmund’, he recollected later, ‘that I was left searching for a reason. I questioned myself about whether there had been an alteration in my method of dealing with him.’ Reflecting on their defeat, Ferguson wondered if he ‘had been talking to him less than [he] should’. He had sensed that Cantona needed more space, more freedom to find out how he could best lead the team. The captaincy he had inherited after Steve Bruce had retired at the end of the previous season was not a natural role for him. While admitting that there might have been ‘a mental block’ in Éric’s persona when it came to so-called ‘big European nights’, a puzzled Ferguson argued that ‘there were such occasions when Éric played marvellously for us’. But which ones could he be thinking of?