Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  I read the reports and watched the videos, trying to find these elusive moments of personal triumph, and could only come up with two: a late equalizer against Galatasaray and the trouncing of Porto in Manchester, when a couple of early goals had rocked the Portuguese side and precipitated a state of euphoria in the whole United side. Compare this with the record of another French superstar in whom many see a ‘choker’ on the European stage, Thierry Henry. Cantona never scored a winning goal at the Bernabéu, a double at San Siro or a hat-trick at the Stadio Olimpico. Henry did, and when it mattered. Éric himself has never won an international trophy with club or country, unless the 1988 European under-21 title is taken into account – and you may remember a ban had prevented him from playing in the second leg of the final. That a player blessed with such strength of character and such talent could prove an almost complete failure in European competitions is a mystery for which I can only offer a few clues – but no definite explanation. One such clue is that Éric had felt – and for quite a long time – that his club wasn’t prepared to spend the money needed to purchase the proven matchwinners who could help him lift United to success in Europe. These promises failed to materialize, adding to Éric’s disillusionment with a club that he believed was now prioritizing its image as a marketing commodity.

  Retirement wasn’t uppermost in his mind just yet, however. Three meetings had been held with United chairman Martin Edwards since the beginning of March, and both parties appeared to favour a new extension to Cantona’s present contract, which had over a year to run. There was no reason to believe that the tap-in he scored against Blackburn (3–2) on 12 April, three days after the Dortmund heartbreaker, would be his last goal for Manchester United – or for anyone else, which it was. He was at the apex of his fame, I’d almost say his popularity, as he’d overcome the consequences of his moment of madness at Crystal Palace with great dignity. The adulation he received in his adopted city showed no sign of abating. Thirteen thousand people visited the City of Manchester Art Gallery in the last two weeks of April, to gaze on The Art of the Game, a 10ft by 8ft painting by local artist Michael Browne.56 The composition was based on Piero Delia Francesca’s Resurrection of Christ and Andrea Mantegna’s Julius Caesar on his Triumphal Chariot, in which Cantona’s likeness had been substituted for the Lamb’s, to the outrage of a few and the amusement of many. To the person on the street it will be tongue in cheek,’ the artist said. ‘I don’t believe people will take it seriously as an insult. It reflects street humour – the kind of humour the fans have.’

  Naked but for a cloth wrapped around his hips, Éric the Saviour emerged from the tomb, surrounded by Phil Neville, David Beckham, Nicky Butt and Gary Neville. Alex Ferguson lurked in the background. Browne’s work was meant to be taken with a pinch of salt, but also provided a poignant allegory of Cantona’s redemption.

  Prolonging his stay at Old Trafford guaranteed Éric another shot at European glory, even if Dortmund were to prevail later in the month: United, helped by one of’keeper David James’s more eccentric displays, snuffed out Liverpool’s last hopes of taking the title by winning 3–1 at Anfield on 19 April. Cantona, with one eye on the European semi-final taking place four days later, didn’t exert himself unduly that afternoon, not that he had to. His team now needed just five points from their last four games, three of them at home, to make sure they claimed the Premiership for the fourth time in five years. This was a stupendous achievement, no doubt about it, especially as Alex Ferguson had had to rebuild his squad after the sale or retirement of a number of key players, and found the courage to replace them with products of the club’s academy. Stupendous as it was, though, it was overshadowed by the expectancy surrounding the coming of Borussia to Old Trafford on the 23rd. At the end of these 90 minutes was a place in the grandest of all club finals, which carried extra significance for Manchester United that year, as it would be played in Munich, where, on 6 February 1958, BEA flight 609 crashed on a snow-shrouded runway, claiming twenty-three victims, eight of whom were members of Matt Busby’s famed ‘Babes’ team.

  ‘Old Trafford’s biggest night for thirty years’ – since United had beaten Real Madrid 1–0 in their 1968 semi-final – was meant to be Éric’s own coronation as the King of Europe, not just England. But what 53,606 spectators witnessed was an abdication. Their team squandered chance after chance against a side still missing their captain, and Cantona was the worst culprit. When the young midfielder Lars Ricken shot Borussia into the lead with seven minutes on the clock, United now needed to score three to go through. Incredibly, they could – they should – have done it. In the sixteenth minute, Cole’s cross-shot was pushed out by Klos, fell to Cantona, just a few yards from goal – with just Kohier, already off balance, to beat. He could have skipped past the defender and pushed the ball into the net. But no, he blasted it against Kohler’s legs. Minutes later, the ball trickled to him just outside the area, in what should have been a perfect position to shoot, but he dithered, as did Cole. On fifty-three minutes, finally, the ball broke to Éric’s feet, on the edge of the six-yard box. He dinked the ball over Klos – but too weakly, and Dortmund cleared it off the line.

  Cantona’s ghost had been playing, the ghost of a player who had died at the end of the previous season, as his adviser Jean-Jacques Bertrand all but confirmed when he said, towards the end of May, that ‘Éric’s decision to stop playing football was due to the fact that [Aimé] Jacquet decided not to pick him for the French team from 1995. His decision to end his career was because he knew he will never play in the World Cup.’ In other words, when he had committed suicide in January 1996.

  Immediately after the game, Ferguson exploded in the dressing-room, where Éric, the captain, visibly sickened, remained absolutely silent. The morning after, Cantona asked for a face-to-face meeting with his manager, who talked about it – to Erik Bielderman – for the first time ten years after the event. ‘I had a bad premonition. I could guess what he was about to tell me. I had noticed several changes in his mood and his physical appearance.’

  Cantona had had enough. Football was over for him. He had decided to retire, to quit at the top. The fact that he broke the news to a man he not only respected, but loved, so soon after this catastrophic defeat leads me to suspect that he had thought about leaving the sport that had been his life since he was a minot in Marseilles long before Dortmund killed off the last dream he had as a player. He had often acted on impulse, a leaf carried by the wind of his enthusiasm, his grudges and his disappointments, but not this time. United’s supporters were probably too much in shock to digest what their manager dictated to his Manchester Evening News amanuensis: ‘It looks as if the chances he missed – not to mention his relatively quiet performance – have prompted him to question his future.’

  Ferguson’s first reaction was one of disbelief. To him, the league winner of 1996–97 had ‘another two good years in his legs’ (an opinion shared by Henri Émile, who saw Cantona play a superb game in a testimonial two days before the annoucement of his retirement). ‘But in his mind, the standards he set himself were so high that he felt he had almost betrayed himself with his disappointing performances towards the end of the 1996–97 season.’ Ferguson did everything he could to try and convince Cantona to think it over again. When he realized that nothing he could say would make Éric change his mind, he reverted to an old trick. ‘Go and see your father, talk to him, and come back to see me,’ he said. Éric agreed to discuss his decision with Albert; but when he came back, a week later, his resolution had hardened. A wish, a choice which could have been inspired by the bitterness of yet another adieu to consecration in Europe, had now become an irrevocable decision. ‘When [Éric] has got something in his head,’ Ferguson told Bielderman, ‘it is almost impossible to make him drop it.’

  Still, for a while, in fact for most of the following summer, he believed it might be possible to bring Éric back. All his entreaties failed, even though, unbeknown to his ex-manager, Cantona toyed w
ith the idea of a comeback. In a neat twist, one of the clubs that tried to attract him was Nagoya Grampus Eight, in Japan, the country where he had wanted to escape to after his first retirement in 1991. But it was more of a defence mechanism, one way to deal with the huge void of his footballing death – a means for Éric to mourn Cantona. There were still four games to play. The teamsheets tell us that Éric took part in all of them, but it was as a transient presence, a corruption of the great player he had been. Had Manchester United’s rivals possessed the belief and the physical resources needed to chase the champions in the last furlong of the title race, had they identified and exploited the gaping hole that had appeared in the team after the Dortmund disasters, maybe – just maybe – another name would have been engraved on the Premier League trophy that year. United finished the season in neutral, with Éric withdrawn in the role of a playmaker behind Andy Cole and Ole-Gunnar Solskjær. They drew 2–2 at Leicester, 3–3 at home against Middlesbrough: four points dropped. Meanwhile, their supposed rivals were doing their best to go into reverse themselves. Arsenal lost at home, and then on 6 May Liverpool capitulated at Wimbledon and Newcastle conceded a pitiful 0–0 draw at West Ham. Another title had fallen into Alex Ferguson’s lap, irrespective of what would happen in the last two games of this strangely unsatisfying campaign. And Éric, quintuple champion of England, would never win the title in front of his home crowd.

  In Prestbury, Isabelle was already packing the family’s belongings into the cardboard boxes that had been part of her life for ten years. Among the photographs she put away was one of her son Raphaël, Claude Boli and Gary King posing alongside the trophies Éric had won in 1996. It had been displayed on the fireplace until then, but it no longer belonged to the present. ‘In football, yesterday happened a long time ago,’ as Billy Bremner said. ‘When I was younger,’ Éric confided to Libération in the summer, ‘I loved the idea of theatrical tours, like they did in Molière’s time. Sometimes, they’d be on the road for a year. Leaving – that’s what I’ve always done in football.’ This time, it was for good, and for Barcelona, soon after the season was over. Raphaël would be enrolled in the local English school – English, not French – in a city ‘close to the idea I have of life. [It is] open, capable of unearthing talents. People haven’t stopped at Gaudi or Miró here, even if they haven’t forgotten what they owe them. To stop [ . . .] is to accept death. And I’ll never be ready for that. I’ve got so many things to see, so many things to live before I die.’

  In the photographs of the champions posing with the trophy (which Cantona didn’t kiss) on the Old Trafford pitch, which was presented to them after they had beaten West Ham 2–0 on 11 May, Éric is at the back, permitting himself a gentle smile. His is the face of a 40-year-old man, though. It’s raining softly. He had already received his ‘Manchester United Player of the Year’ award in the centre circle. His last meaningful gesture as a player had been to deliver a pass of delightful accuracy to Jordi Cruyff (who had come on as a substitute, possibly because his father Johann was at the ground that day), who smashed it past Ludk Mikloško.

  ‘I swapped my shirt with some guy,’ he remembered later. ‘I’ve heard that he sold it at an auction later on, probably for charity.’ The ‘guy’ was John Moncur, whom he had almost beheaded with a donkey kick in March 1994 – Éric’s first red card in England. ‘I didn’t feel anything. Because I wanted to stop. I’d had enough. And I was telling myself I could come back whenever I wanted. I was thinking: “You’re young, you train for two months, you’re back.” I thought that way for a long time. I couldn’t find the fire [in me]. Football had been my life, the passion of my childhood. The day when the fire goes out, why go on? To go to the Emirates and pocket 300 billion euros? I wasn’t interested in that.’

  Contemporary reports suggested that Cantona ‘[had] received no firm commitment about his future since his below-par performance in [United’s] European Champions League exit against Borussia Dortmund, and there have been suggestions that for financial reasons, he will not get any such commitment’. They were well wide of the mark, as United were desperate to hold on to their prize asset – and it was precisely this ‘assetization’ that rankled with the player, as he explained.

  The environment contributed a lot to the extinction of that fire. Manchester, it’s a lot of merchandising. You’re sometimes needed for a video, a book, photographs, interviews . . . to avoid chaos, I signed very clear contracts with the club. I gave them exclusivity on my photographs. But they didn’t respect [the contract]. I went to see Ferguson, then the chairman. I told them – careful, some things are happening. To give you an example, one morning, before a game, on my way to having breakfast, I came across a magazine on which I was on the front page. There are people who couldn’t care less about being on the cover of a celebrity magazine. They’re even proud of it. Me, it destroys me, even if I play a game, it becomes more important than the game. I live this as a kind of betrayal. So, on the day I told the club I was retiring, I warned them: ‘OK, I’m stopping, but you should know I’ll sue the merchandising.’ The problem is that England is very beautiful in many respects, but very ugly when it comes down to the image and to the press. It’s unhealthy.

  Éric won his suit against World Foot Center and Manchester United Merchandising Limited in 2000. The companies paid compensation thought to have been worth £50,000.

  Éric’s decision to retire was conveyed to the general public by Martin Edwards on Sunday 18 May, at 15:38 precisely. Within minutes of the agency reporters filing their copy, half of Manchester was in mourning. Hundreds of supporters, many of them in tears, converged on Matt Busby Way, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say, as nothing could have prepared them for the abruptness of their hero’s departure. Manchester United’s shares dropped 22.5p when the markets reopened. The next morning, paper after paper referred to the ‘funereal atmosphere around Old Trafford’, and, for once, the cliché rang true: the King was dead, and no dauphin was in sight. Of Éric himself, of his whereabouts, all that was known was that his family was holidaying abroad: in fact, he had sought refuge at his parents’ hideaway in the Provençal village of Villar, where a French paparazzo snapped him sitting his son Raphaël on a Harley-Davidson motorbike.

  The shock that engulfed Manchester United supporters was also felt keenly among the players, even though Gary Pallister, for one, had felt that Cantona’s mood throughout the season, and especially in the last few months, had been suspiciously morose. Ryan Giggs asked himself the rhetorical question ‘Were we surprised?’ in 2005, and came up with this answer: ‘Life with Éric was one long surprise.’ ‘You never knew what he would do next,’ he told Joe Lovejoy. ‘There were no farewells or anything like that, and I didn’t really believe he meant it until he failed to turn up the following season. He was a fit lad, and he could definitely have gone on longer.’

  I’m not so sure. What had snapped could not be mended, what is dead cannot be revived; and when Cantona reflected on the last trick he played on his audience, as he did surprisingly often in years to come, it was always in unequivocal terms, with a stark awareness of what it means for a performer to leave the stage for good: it is death. And quite appropriately, the dozens of columns printed in the British press on that Monday morning read like obituaries. Simon Barnes even gave his the title ‘Intimations of Mortality’.

  That word, ‘death’, kept coming back in a fascinating interview Éric gave to David Walsh of the Sunday Times in 2006. ‘When you are a footballer,’ he told the journalist, ‘you do something very public, you do it because it is a passion and you feel alive when you’re doing it. You feel alive also because people recognize you for the job you do. Then you quit and it’s like a death. A lot of footballers are afraid and that is why they go on TV to speak about the game. They do it for themselves. It is important because it helps them to feel alive again, to deal with their fears about this death.’

  A bemused Amelia Gentleman had recorded similar thoughts fo
r the Guardian in 2003.

  If you only have one passion in life – and pursue it to the exclusion of everything else – it becomes very dangerous. When you stop doing this activity, it is as though you are dying. The death of that activity is a death in itself. Often there are players who have only football as a way of expressing themselves and never develop other interests. And when they no longer play football, they no longer do anything; they no longer exist, or rather they have the sensation of no longer existing. Too many players think they are eternal.

  Éric Cantona’s life was brief. He was born as a professional footballer on 5 November 1983, in Auxerre, and died on 11 May 1997 at Old Trafford. Less than fourteen years, a blink within a blink within eternity. The man lived on, became an actor, took France to a world title in beach soccer, divorced Isabelle, remarried, might even come back to football as a manager for all we know. It is not a sad story; at least I hope that the story I’ve told is not a sad one. He achieved a great deal, he failed sometimes. He erred. But he was true to his half-truths when most are content to lie, and that – lying – he never did. He was naïve, flawed, arrogant, self-serving, violent, egotistical. But he was also the most generous of men, for what he gave he gave for the sake of giving. He enriched the lives of millions, he fed their dreams and – sometimes – realized them. As I’m about to say goodbye to him, that is the one picture of Éric I want to keep: Cantona the provider of beauty, the eternal child doomed to age, who knows it and chooses to give two fingers to fate. I’ll be my own man, he says, and fuck the whole lot of you who think I can’t do it. It is pathetic, it is admirable, it is Éric Cantona.