Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Another thought had crossed Roux’s mind: ‘Éric’s going to kill himself on the road.’ It’s only as Jean-Marie Lanoé and myself were on our way back to Paris that I remembered a slip of the manager’s tongue which I would have thought nothing of, had my friend not reminded me of Michel N’Gom’s tragic story. You’ll remember that Roux had mentioned Cantona’s battered Renault 5. But Cantona, who had passed his driving test in August, drove a (battered) Peugeot 104. He’d have loved to own one, preferably an ‘apple-green 5TS, with black spoilers’, the car he much later said he dreamt about when he was a child. It was N’Gom who owned a Renault 5. He was a brilliant young player of Senegalese origin who, like Cantona, had been educated at La Mazargue, before joining Marseille, Toulon, Marseille again, and PSG, with whom he won two French Cups. Roux had recruited him for the 1984–85 season. He played ten games for Auxerre, all of them preseason friendlies, before he was killed in a car crash on 12 August 1984, aged twenty-six. N’Gom was a bon vivant who, during his three seasons in Paris, had spent a great deal of his spare time in the nightclubs of the capital. Once at Auxerre, he travelled incessantly in his car to catch up with the friends he had left behind in Paris. It was on his way back from one of these escapades that, surprised by the presence of a tractor in the middle of the road, he crashed a few hundred yards from his home, where his parents were expecting him for Sunday lunch.

  And this is why Éric Cantona, French under-19 international, was loaned out for seven months to a club that had won nothing in sixty seasons, bar a brace of Coupes de Provence.

  Two weeks after Auxerre had been knocked out by Milan, Éric packed all his belongings in his 104, including a large black-and-white television set which he strapped in the front passenger seat, and made his way down the autoroute du soleil. His move to Martigues attracted very little attention in the media, though his six months there didn’t entirely pass without incident. Éric did his job, and did it rather better than is suggested in his autobiography, where this half-year-long episode is only alluded to. A return of four goals in fifteen appearances might seem modest at such a level, until you know that this made him Martigues’ leading goalscorer for that period. ‘He was a pivotal player for us,’ Herbet told me. ‘He was the main reason we stayed up.’ His new coach had been a fine footballer himself, a member of the French team that hadn’t disgraced itself when losing 2–0 to England in the 1966 World Cup. Built like a flyweight, he had relied on skill, speed of thought and imagination to build a professional career, and was naturally receptive to Éric’s artistry.

  ‘This boy could do everything in front of goal,’ he recalls. ‘Left foot, right foot, first touch, headers, volleys – he had it all.’ Cantona being Cantona, Herbet needed to show patience and understanding too. ‘Yes, he had a real temper on him. He lacked maturity. But I quickly saw that you needed to build him up to get the best out of him. When you brutalize Cantona, he hits the wall. So I trusted him. We spoke about painting – not something I’ve got much knowledge of, but he enjoyed talking about it. And, in the end, it all went well. I’d been told that he’d had problems relating to some of his Auxerre teammates; but with us? No. Deep down, he is a good man.’ A good man who could, of course, ‘blow a gasket’ on occasion, especially if, as he said later, with some exaggeration, that he had ‘almost forgotten football’ at the time, being too busy building a life with Isabelle.

  The young couple – he was still nineteen, she twenty-two – spent their evenings poring over maps of Provence, choosing destinations for their Sunday escapades in the countryside. The holy site of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, sacred to Gipsy pilgrims, the wilderness of the Camargue, where white horses roam the marshes and flamingos dot the lagoons, the pink, ochre and purple rocky desolation of Les Baux. This was a time for romance, not football. Back at home, Albert wondered why his son barely sent him news. Éric himself had all but forgotten about Guy Roux. His on-field discipline suffered. He had never been sent off in a competitive game when at Auxerre, but at Martigues was shown the red card on two occasions. The first incident occurred, quite perversely, in the easiest game of the Martégaux’s campaign, a 5–0 slaughter of Grasse in the French Cup, on 15 December 1985. This fracas was eerily similar to what happened at Selhurst Park in January 1995. As Herbet recalls it, a spectator seated near the touch-line had showered abuse on Éric, who reacted, ran to the perimeter fence and gave as good as he had got, far too much for the referee’s taste, who sent him off there and then. That was quite a day for the Cantonas: Éric’s normally reserved elder brother Jean-Marie apparently injured his hand jumping over the fence, trying to put right the same spectator. But unlike the hurricane that blew up in the media when Éric flew, feet first, into the crowd at Crystal Palace, Éric’s temporary loss of self-control only warranted a couple of lines in the local press match reports, as did his second sending-off – for reasons no one I’ve spoken to can remember – against Cannes, in the penultimate game of the season.

  Encouraged by the reports on Éric’s progress at Martigues, Roux decided the time had come to tie him to Auxerre on a long-term contract, which L’Équipe reported to be for eight seasons. On 1 February 1986, the AJA manager travelled to the Stade Gerland, where Lyon were hosting the Martégaux. The Lyonnais, who had promotion in their sights, could not break down Herbet’s defence, and had to satisfy themselves with a 0–0 draw. Shortly after the final whistle, somewhere in the cavernous underbelly of the stadium, Roux came across Éric’s father, and told him all his son had to do to fulfil his ambition of becoming a professional footballer was to sign the papers he had brought with him. Auxerre being Auxerre (and Guy Roux being Guy Roux), Cantona wouldn’t earn a great deal of money, not much more than a mid-ranking executive of a mid-ranking company would expect to find on the bottom line of his wage slip. To Éric and Isabelle, who had survived on a pittance in Aix-en-Provence, this was a fortune. What’s more, back in Burgundy, Cantona would be ‘free’, by which he meant ‘free to put cartridges in my shotgun, and go and shoot thrushes or pigeons as soon as training was over’, as he had been doing in the hills of the Garlaban. ‘Free to undergo psychoanalysis without people saying I was mad’, as he did ‘out of curiosity’, because it was ‘enjoyable to make visible things which are invisible’, in order ‘to better understand others by better understanding myself’ – quite a remarkable statement in the mouth of a twenty-year-old, especially when this twenty-year-old kicked a football for a living. ‘Free, yes, to paint and to live 20 kilometres away from Auxerre, with my girlfriend and my [two] dogs,’ Brenda and Balrine. And as ever, Roux would be there to watch over the young man he would come to care about as if he were a son.

  ‘Isabelle and Éric were the first people to live in a house I’d built in Poilly,’ he told me. ‘They didn’t have a home. My village had put aside a whole plot of land for development; but bang in the middle of it was a stretch of acacia woodland, which belonged to my grandfather, who refused to sell it, because it came from his own grandfather. I told him: I’ll buy the land from you, and I’ll build a house on it. It won’t leave the family. He agreed. And when the house was built, Cantona was the first person to live there. They were just by the trees . . . He was a perfect lodger. Then they bought a house in Poilly-sur-Tholon, a village with a beautiful church, where they got married.’

  The wedding took place in February 1987, a ceremony that the manager – father figure and now landlord – did not attend, as he had to supervise a youth team game that afternoon. Indeed, according to legend, Éric and Isabelle nearly missed the ceremony themselves. I cannot resist retelling this legend myself: somehow, in the middle of winter, they came across a basket of cherries, and gathered handfuls of bigarreaux to festoon their nuptial clothes; time flew by; as they were still dressing each other with fruit, the guests looked at their watches, as did the mayor – another few minutes, and the next couple would be ushered in. Happily, just in time, the couple walked in, looking like an Arcimboldo fantasy, and exchanged their v
ows in front of a nonplussed but relieved congregation. It is pure invention, of course, but somehow fitting of a most unlikely couple: the footballer and the graduate. What is true is that no invitations had been sent in the post, as Bernard Ferrer remembered twenty years later: ‘In our country, you normally send out notices when you get married, but Éric did it the other way round. He sent out the wedding announcements afterwards. This is typical of him.’

  It is tempting to view Éric’s footballing life as a non-stop rush towards fame, success and self-destruction in almost equal measures; and over the three years this book took to research and to write, I became more convinced by the day that, all along, there had been a quasi-suicidal streak in the would-be footballing artist, a temptation to equate triumph with death, be it real – Jim Morrison overdosing in Paris – or symbolical – Arthur Rimbaud cutting short his life as a poet to become a slave merchant in Abyssinia. For every trophy won, there appears to have been an outburst of violence, an outrageous public statement, or yet another controversy to fill the back pages (and in his case, the front pages too) of newspapers. He revelled in thinking of himself as a victim, as it brought him proof that he too, like the ‘geniuses’ he admired, was doomed to be misunderstood and vilified. But there have also been moments in his career when, helped by Isabelle’s presence, and guided by an understanding manager, he was able to appease his feverish impulses, and almost forgot to behave the way he believed or felt Canto should. The 1986–87 season was one of these plateaux of – relative – serenity, as the campaigns of 1993–94 and 1995–96 would be at Manchester United.

  Back in Auxerre, with Szarmach retired, the newlywed was given the keys to Auxerre’s attack by Guy Roux, and repaid his manager’s skilful handling by stringing together magnificent performances for the club. It took him a while to find the target, finally scoring in his ninth game of the campaign, a 3–0 victory over St Étienne on 13 September; but as soon as he did, AJA, who had endured another pitiful start to to the campaign (not a single victory until Éric broke his duck), took off quite spectacularly, and steadily climbed up the league table to finish in fourth spot. Éric’s superb vision and assurance in front of goal (seventeen successful strikes in all competitions that season, six of which transformed draws into victories, plus four with the French under-21s) were the difference between uneasy survival in the soft belly of the Première Division and qualification for Europe. Even a two-month lay-off due to injury, the longest he had had to suffer in his career so far – from the 20 December to the end of February – failed to hold him back; and when he returned to the first team, he was the catalyst for a superb series of results: Auxerre would remain undefeated in the league until mid-May.

  As French journalists are prone to say, Cantona ‘exploded’ that year – on the field, in the best possible way, and in his countrymen’s consciousness, not just because of his prowess with a ball at his feet, but also because, one evening in early September 1986, he paid a visit to a hairdresser in Brittany and came out of the salon looking like a convict, his head as smooth as a snooker ball. Remember: there was a lot of hair on show when teams assembled for their annual official photograph in those days. Éric’s whim might have been not much more than a schoolboyish prank, but it certainly made him cut him a bizarre figure in the ultra-conservative village of eighties football.

  Guy Roux’s amusement is not feigned when he tells the story: ‘We went to Roscoff three or four days before facing Brest, a strong team at the time, with players like Bernard Lama, Julio Cesar, Paul Le Guen, Martins, and quite a few others. As Roscoff is twinned with Auxerre, we were treated to a civic reception at the town hall. Speeches, canapés, nothing was missing . . . except my youngsters, all of them. No one knew where they’d gone. Dinner was served at seven. No sign of Canto and his band of merry men . . . Dutuel, Prunier, Mazzolini, Tarras . . . I could see the street outside from my seat. Fifteen, twenty minutes later, I catch a glimpse of him, straight-backed as usual. He walks in, sits down without a word. He’s waiting for me to scream at him. But I don’t. Nobody dares say anything. You’d have thought they were serving supper in a Trappist monastery. Finally, when dessert is brought in, I make an announcement: “I’ll give my verdict tomorrow at 22:00.”’ After the final whistle, of course.

  Roux beams. ‘We were 3–0 after 15 minutes’ play.’ (Which, by the way, is not true. Auxerre drew 0–0 that day, 3 September 1986; but Guy Roux is not the kind of raconteur to spoil a good story by something as trivial as a scoreless draw.)

  He went on: ‘Cantona had had his head shaved! And all his friends had gone to the barber’s with him! That evening – what fun! – I had the room opposite his. I go out of my bedroom, and here he was, talking to Isabelle on the phone: “Yes, Isa! I am completely bald . . . no, not a hair left . . . and I’m so cold!”’

  Cantona had acted on impulse, as usual, to fulfil a sudden desire to ‘feel the freshness of water, the power of the wind’ on his bare skull; maybe. But there must also have been the mischievous itch to test his boss’s patience, to find out how far the staunch traditionalist would allow his twenty-year-old striker to bend the rules his rebellious way. Roux himself didn’t take the bait. But the sight of a bald teenager on the pitches of the championnat was unusual enough to catch the attention of a number of French publications. It hardly mattered that Cantona had scored the grand total of six goals in thirty-nine games for Auxerre so far – and would have to wait until 13 September to open his account for the 1986–87 season.

  Interviewers made a beeline for the Stade de l’Abbé-Deschamps and Éric’s home in the forest, where he supplied them with enough quirky quotes and references to poets, painters, philosophers and the like to try and convince their readers that a rather different, previously unsuspected species of footballer had been discovered in northern Burgundy. Paris-Match, the magazine one could find in every French dentist’s waiting-room at the time, allowed space for Éric’s stream-of-consciousness effusions beside its regular instalments of comings and goings at the princely court of Monaco, marriages of uncrowned Ruritanian royals and the odd half-serious report about some war taking place somewhere else. Over the next nine months, Cantona became the first celebrity footballer in his country’s history, when others – Platini, Kopa – had merely gained fame for their on-field achievements. Éric would later revile the ‘media circus’ that would follow his every move and misdemeanour, perhaps forgetting how willing a subject he had been at the time, and how much it would help him to appear – at least for a couple of seasons – to be the answer to the question ‘What now?’, which followed France’s defeat by Germany in the semi-finals of the 1986 World Cup.

  That summer, the ‘golden generation’ led by Michel Platini had fired its last bullets in Mexico, winning an unforgettable game against Brazil before surrendering to the Germans. Their tournament, which also included a 2–0 victory over world champions Italy, ended with a sadly predictable whimper, predictable inasmuch as the team which had emerged eight years before in Argentina had reached the end of its life cycle. One by one, the heroes of Seville 1982, Les Bleus most mythical game (they were denied a place in the World Cup final by the Germans on penalties, having led 3–1 in the first period of extra time), announced their retirement from the international game, within weeks of an epoch-closing defeat. Some were too old. Others were spending more time in the physiotherapist’s treatment room than on the training ground. The rest suffered from burn-out. Of the superb squad gathered by national coach Michel Hidalgo, who also took his bow and passed on the baton to the former Nantes midfielder Henri Michel, only a couple survived: left-back Manuel Amoros and defensive midfielder Luis Fernandez. France was in mourning. The search was on for a new Giresse, a new Trésor – one dared not say a new Platini.

  Éric’s timing was as crisp as a Brian Lara on-drive. Out of nowhere, it seemed, had appeared – Kojak-headed, his chest puffed out like one of Napoleon’s field marshals – a pro who talked like no other pro dared to talk, and
could play a bit too, as he proved by scoring on his debut for France’s under-21s, a 4–1 ‘friendly’ thrashing of Hungary, which took place nine days after he had startled the great and good of Roscoff On 10 October his two goals gave a far more significant 2–1 victory over USSR in Le Havre – the game that sparked a magnificent adventure for Les Bleuets of Marc Bourrier, another of these southern managers who had an instinctive appreciation of and affection for the maverick of Marseilles. His team would be crowned European champions in June 1988, with Cantona suspended, as we’ll see. And the closer one looks at the legendary misfit, the more one is struck by how snugly he fitted in the tangle of aspirations, doubts and fantasies of French football as it saw its most successful troopers and generals head for Les Invalides.

  Cantona’s star wouldn’t have risen as spectacularly, and rapidly, if these fantasies hadn’t had a new medium to feed on: subscription TV channel Canal+, then a byword for modernity and trendiness. Just as Sky television would use coverage of football in all its guises as a battering ram into British homes, Canal+ exploited the epic progress of France’s best young footballers in Europe for something more than what it was worth. Until then, this competition – of which France had never even reached the final – had been pretty much ignored by media and public alike. But the up-and-coming TV channel needed to differentiate itself from and compete with the established, government-controlled terrestrial networks, which held exclusive rights over the senior team’s games. Canal+ was about the new, the untried, and sold itself as an outsider, a trend-bucker on its way to becoming a trend-setter. X-rated films on Saturday nights. Marc Bourrier’s Espoirs (literally, ‘The Hopes’) on match days. What Canal+ heralded, of course, was not an age of quasi-anarchistic freedom and hedonism, but of consumerism and instant gratification, in which it would come to represent a different kind of Establishment. Few saw it that way at the time.