Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  The contrast between the exuberance of Marc Bourrier’s hopefuls and the drabness of a declining national team couldn’t have been starker. Cantona and Co. took risks, scored outrageous goals – and won. Henri Michel’s eleven stuttered, looked for and couldn’t find an identity – and would miss out on the European Championships and World Cup qualification. The horse that Canal+ had picked was rushing home, when it could have cantered to the line. The next year-and-a-half was the making of Cantona as a footballing icon in France.

  If everyone soon knew how different Éric was, very little had filtered through of his more erratic behaviour at Auxerre. Roux, who employed spies not just on motorways, but also in every nightclub in Burgundy, was known to hop on his moped in the small hours of the morning to drag home a player who had been spotted on the dance floor of some rural disco. He was equally good at keeping his extended family’s linen washed in-house. No one was aware then of one particular hair-raising incident which had taken place a few months previously, during a pre-season visit to Poland. According to Roux, it could have led to a diplomatic incident. Auxerre took part in a tournament in Mielec, in the south-east of Poland. Cantona treats the public to a scissor-kick, then to a magnificent goal . . . but they don’t like it, oh no. As we’re walking off, a guy throws an egg, which explodes on his thigh. He loses it completely, I try and hold him by his coat-tails, but no way, it was as if I were water-skiing behind a speed-boat!’ One is rarely bored in Guy Roux’s company. One sip of Irancy, then: ‘Éric climbs in the stand – looks for the guy – and I’m thinking: “Let’s hope that guy is hiding somewhere,” and I’m saying, “Éric, if you hit him, we’re in communist Poland, you’ll get ten years, and we won’t be able to get you out!” Bernard Ferrer was yelling, “Think of Isabelle!” But here we are amongst these Polish miners, those guys who go down 2,000 metres every day – but he couldn’t find the egg-thrower, and we were saved.’

  Roux, however, loved Éric more than he had ever loved any other of his young players, and, more often than not, reached for the carrot, not the stick. He took no action when, on 21 February 1987, word got out that Auxerre’s goalkeeper Bruno Martini had been on the receiving end of Cantona’s anger; word – and pictures. Martini sported a magnificent shiner. The door he had walked into was Éric’s head. (‘Make sure people know Éric didn’t throw a punch!’ Roux exhorted me, ‘and tell them it was all Daniel Rolland’s fault!’) It’s fair to say that Martini, a superb ’keeper who had already been selected by France, and would become a long-term member of Les Bleus’ technical staff, did not court popularity with his teammates, and that the rough justice meted out by Éric would have found an acquiescent jury in the Auxerre dressing-room. Like Cantona, Martini affected to find the life of a footballer tedious in the extreme, but unlike Éric, he made no efforts to balance his world-weariness with the kind of horseplay familiar to young footballers the world over. Martini preferred the company of authors like Goethe, Montherlant and Céline to that of fellow players, and listened to Handel oratorios at home. That morning, he made the mistake of demonstrating his contempt by refusing to help the first-teamers and the academy players who were trying to clear the pitch for the final of the Coupe des Alpes, which would pit Auxerre against the Swiss champions Neuchâtel-Xamax. The broadcasting rights of that half-serious, half-friendly encounter had been acquired by Canal+ for half-a-million francs – manna from heaven for a small club like AJA.

  Unfortunately, heaven had also sent down a copious amount of snow – three inches of it – during the night, and the surface of l’Abbé-Deschamps was unplayable. Armed with advertising boards, the whole squad helped to push the slush over the touchline; all the squad – bar Martini. Roux picks up the story: ‘Rolland, who’d been there since the break of dawn, noticed it and told the ’keeper: “Hey, Bruno, maybe you could . . .”’, and Canto said, “Absolutely!” Martini made a dismissive gesture with his hand. He shouldn’t have. Canto went up to him, and bang! That evening, I had to explain to the Canal+ presenter that we’d been practising headers, and that Martini had taken a knock . . .’ Amusingly, Éric, who was still recovering from the injury he had sustained in December, took no part in Auxerre’s 3–1 victory in that game. But Martini did.

  I should add that the veracity of Roux’s account was vouched for by several witnesses of the incident, who accompanied their assent by a knowing smile. Later, when it became a national English pastime to demonize Éric, the Martini ‘punch’ always featured high in the list of his greatest hits. Hardly anyone – no one, in fact – bothered to check what had really happened. The British public was told that ‘Auxerre had punished Cantona with a suspension’ for his assault on Martini. False. He played in the very next game, a 2–0 win at Laval. But who cared about the truth by then? It was enough that another dark spot could be found in his character, and there were so many of those that the picture emerging was black, black, black. The man was a maniac. He had knocked a teammate out cold on the training pitch. Roux knew otherwise. Éric repaid his manager’s clemency by giving his all when it mattered; and all through this magnificent season, it seemed to matter each and every weekend. It was no longer a question of if, but when Éric would make the transition from the under-21 s to the national team, and Roux’s prediction to Cantona’s mother and grandmother would be fulfilled.

  That season came to a close very late for Éric, as late as 16 June, when the Bleuets fought out a 2–1 victory in Norway in which he had, again, been decisive, and which gave Bourrier’s players a place in the quarter-finals of the European Championships. Two weeks later, after the briefest of holidays, he was back in training with his club, and taking part in another staging of the Coupe des Alpes, won 3–1 by Auxerre over Grasshoppers Zurich, Éric adding another goal to his collection. Then the championnat took over, the footballer’s bread and butter, in which AJA dipped a tentative toe, as usual, with a solitary success in their first four games. But Éric’s form remained stupendous throughout, and nobody was surprised to find his name in the squad that Henri Michel announced on 4 August, eight days before France was to play West Germany in Berlin.

  It is customary for players who celebrate their first cap to serve up heartfelt platitudes such as ‘a dream come true’, or ‘the proudest day in my life’ to journalists who’re not too demanding about what ends up on their plates. Not unexpectedly, Éric switched off the autopilot, and the comments he came up with after he had walked off the pitch, having scored the goal that brought the home team back to 1–2, left quite a few taken aback.

  ‘I didn’t feel any pressure on me,’ he said with the straightest face he could conjure up for disbelieving hacks. ‘I am not an emotional person,’ (Really?) ‘and I took this game as if it were a banal league game.’ (Excuse me?) ‘Why should I have made a huge thing of playing against West Germany? The questions I asked myself were purely tactical. I thought about my game. I concentrated. That’s all.’ (But you scored – a clinical finish from ten yards – surely this means something special to you?) ‘It meant nothing to me. Maybe if it had been the equalizer. But then, nothing. I told myself we had fifty minutes or so to re-establish parity.’ (But . . .) ‘Giving up is not a habit of mine. I’ve got my own mental attitude; every one’s got his. But mine suits me perfectly. If I were a coach, I’d transmit it to my players. Because I think I am in the right. In France, we have a tendency to tell a player he’s the most beautiful, the strongest. That’s awful. Nobody will manage to destabilize me or to make me lose my head. I’m quite happy for people to compliment me, but I take it with enough detachment to take it or leave it. In fact, I prefer criticism. My wife told me I hadn’t been good. She knows nothing about football. But I’ll try to please her next time round.’ (Thank you.)

  Was this arrogance, stupidity, or playfulness? Or simply the urge to provide the press with the kind of copy they had been expecting from him for the last nine months, and which flattered him far more deeply than he cared to show? Cantona kept a close eye on wha
t was said and written about him. So did the clan, back in Marseilles. As Gérard Houllier told me forcefully on several occasions, the more talented a footballer is, the more insecure he feels about his ability – and Éric didn’t lack in talent. To illustrate his point, Houllier told me of Juninho Pernambucano, Lyon’s superb midfielder, being physically sick before a number of ‘crunch’ games – in which he almost always performed superbly. Éric might have been his own man, but in this he was no different from most of the players he conversed with on the pitch. What set him apart was his strategy, how he coped with the demands he and others put on himself. He managed his own persona as it pleased him, and with such efficiency that even genuine slips into automatic, quasi-primal speech became indiscernible from calculated statements. He would provoke, attempt to wrong-foot his questioners, with an audacity that verged on the suicidal (that word, again). British reporters seldom came across this side of his character later on. The linguistic barrier might have contributed to this – but only in part, as it became another weapon in Éric’s armoury; his English was good enough, as we’ll see, despite the enduring legend of a sombre, lapidary and barely comprehensible Frenchman at odds with his adopted country’s language.

  Late in September of that year, 1987, a France Football reporter paid a visit to Cantona at the Stade de l’Abbé-Deschamps and came back with an astonishing interview which was published on the 29th of that month. This was twelve days after Éric had missed a number of chances in Auxerre’s 2–0 defeat at Panathinaikos, which seemed to condemn Guy Roux’s team to a first-round exit from the UEFA Cup. As Éric made himself increasingly scarce with the media over the years, papers desperate for Cantona-isms cannibalized this remarkable outpouring of juvenile angst and anger as if it provided the alpha and omega of his personality. Despite Éric’s ingenuous admission that he talked a lot of bullshit’, it became an unreferenced and frequently butchered Urtext in the Cantona canon, which is why I have added it as a postscript to this account of Cantona’s Auxerre years, exactly as France Football readers discovered it in the autumn of 1987. It has never been reprinted since, and I have only excised those parts which dealt with circumstances which would lose all relevance as soon as Panathinaikos did, indeed, usher Auxerre out of the UEFA Cup. (Cantona, who had promised he would win the return leg ‘on his own’ after his poor display in the first match, was almost as good as his word: on 30 September he scored one of Auxerre’s three goals. But the Greek side hit back with two of their own, and that was that.)

  This extended question-and-answer session gave a fascinating glimpse into the naïve, contradictory, but also profoundly sincere and sometimes strikingly expressed convictions of a very young man. It also shocked and divided that part of public opinion which paid attention to football enough to cut the country into two camps, whose garrisons would entrench themselves deeper and deeper as years went by. To some, he was not so much a breath of fresh air as a tornado that swept away the hypocrisy of the bien-pensants, a non-conformist who could literally do no wrong, victimized by cowards and careerists. To others (the majority, to begin with), a mildly deranged, self-justifying, self-aggrandizing voyou who talked nonsense and could get away with it as long as he put footballs into a net. At the first sign of weakness, Cantona would be shot down by his critics. Tellingly, it was his own actions that provided them with the ammunition.

  ‘If I have a piece of advice to give to the young, it is to count on nobody but themselves to succeed. It gives me pleasure that ten-year-olds have my poster on their bedroom wall. But I ask those who, one day, will be contacted by professional clubs, to tear that poster up’.

  That poster’ could have been a blown-up photograph taken by a man who met Éric on the very day he gave that infamous interview. Didier Fèvre – who snapped France Football’s cover shot – had started pointing his camera at sportspeople only six months previously. His pedigree was unusual in many respects – his father had been the favourite printer of Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson – and Didier himself was accustomed to rubbing shoulders with film actors and directors rather than footballers. Despite, or because of this background, he became close to a number of players whose interests extended beyond the playing field or the after-match visit to a nightclub – Dominique Rocheteau, Gerald Passi, Éric’s great friend Stéphane Paille, to name a few. But it is with Cantona that he established the most passionate of these friendships – almost a love affair in its intensity, whose sudden and unpredictable breakdown Didier has not quite got over, seventeen years later. ‘Our relationship was one of exchange, an enrichment for the both of us,’ he told me. ‘Éric was so keen to discover new things, to open himself to new experiences,’ like sitting down in Fèvre’s Parisian sitting room to watch Max Ophüls’s films – Le Plaisir was a favourite – and talk for hours about the great creators the photographer had met in his youth. Didier saw a side of Éric’s character that was off limits to his football acquaintances: a shy aspiring artist experimenting with mixed media, applying layers of colour to cut-outs of photographs, modest about his own talent, eager to discuss his work, and genuinely open to criticism and suggestions. The pair would spend their family holidays together, often joined by Paille and his wife. As he was drawn ever closer to the epicentre of the Cantona circle, Fèvre became party to information his workmates at L’Équipe would have killed for, and which he had to keep secret, putting himself in ever more delicate situations. But Éric had put his trust in him, fully, without afterthought or calculation. He valued loyalty above all other virtues, and, demanding as he was, also showed himself to be the most generous of friends – that is, until he felt, often without justification, or for reasons only he could fathom, that this trust had been abused or betrayed, two words which could pass for synonyms in his vocabulary.

  As often with Cantona, a friendship would be born when he found himself confronted by someone who had the courage to question him, or willing to stand his ground when challenged by authority. That afternoon in Auxerre, in Fèvre’s case, authority took the shape of Guy Roux. ‘I didn’t know much about Cantona,’ Fèvre recalls, ‘but I’d been struck by the way he celebrated his goals, with a movement of his arm, his fist clenched, very imperious, chest upright, like a Roman Caesar. I was quite shy – I wasn’t really part of the world of football yet. Roux agreed to give me fifteen minutes with his player. I asked Canto if he wouldn’t mind doing this gesture for me. He – an actor to the core – complied and started gesticulating on his own. Guy Roux noticed it, and told me: “You’re not here to make my kids behave like clowns.” I heard myself replying: “Mr Roux, when it comes to football, I am in no position to give you any advice; but leave the photography to me.” Canto was astonished! Guy Roux too, I suppose. He wasn’t used to people talking to him like this, and he just said: “All right, all right, do your thing.” And I guess this is how Éric first noticed me, the first step he took in building up our friendship.’

  A few of Didier’s pictures appear in this book, which show a man very different from the ‘Roman Caesar’ who was, again, the fulcrum of Auxerre’s side in the 1987–88 season, a year of consolidation, confirmation and eventually turmoil for the newly capped international.

  Éric needed to be at his best for the Icaunais, who had lost a key player – his brother-in-law Bernard Ferrer – as early as 19 August. Ferrer had suffered a fractured thighbone in a home game against Laval, in which Cantona took part. Such injuries are extremely rare in football, and no one could be sure that Ferrer would ever play again. Éric and Isabelle spent half the night by Nino’s bedside. ‘Bernard brought me great confidence,’ Cantona explained to journalists who wondered why Roux’s team was making such a hash of things when it had been expected to challenge for a European place again. ‘Whether we dominated play or not, I knew that, at some stage, I’d receive a pass I could score from.’ Not any longer. With Nino out for a year, Éric had to shoulder yet more responsibility. He did so with a huge heart, played some magnificent football,
showing that for all his flicks and tricks, he was no Flash Harry, but an extravagantly gifted footballer who was born with a rare sense of the collective nature of the game. Roux is still visibly moved by the memory of one of these games when the supposed egotist sacrificed himself to the team cause – a desperately needed 2–1 victory at Le Havre, on 6 October 1987.

  ‘What an awful day it was,’ he told me. ‘A hurricane was blowing from the sea, the rain was lashing down. In the first half, we are playing with the help of the wind, and we score [through Éric, as it happened]. In the second half, Cantona positions himself on the penalty spot – our penalty spot! He clears every corner kick. Each ball he gets, he gets past five players, he manages to bring us 50 metres further upfield, he gives us time to breathe . . . He did that for the whole game. I can still see him. He was so proud of himself! This game was a present from him to us.’ There was steel in the twenty-one-year-old. At a time when Auxerre, short of players and short on form, needed fighters on the pitch – five 0–0 draws in six league games from 24 October to 27 November – he was the most committed of them all. From mid-October to the New Year, every time he scored – three times – Auxerre won, and on no other occasion.