Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  The manner of this defeat irked Cantona more than the result. Rightly or wrongly, he felt that some of his teammates hadn’t been trying as hard as they should have done. He had seen Marseille’s modus operandi from the inside, and would constantly allude to dark deeds in the years to come, to the point that he would describe Tapie as ‘a demon’ on the record. There is no evidence that Marseille bought their victory over Montpellier; but it was later established that they tried to buy one other league game, against minnows Valenciennes. The scandal erupted in May 1993 and led to OM being stripped of their championship title and relegated to the Second Division.13 In any case, frustration was building up in Éric and would later turn to fury.

  The seriousness of Montpellier’s situation affected Pailles form far more than Cantona’s. Both men were remarkable for their highly strung sensitivity, not the greatest of assets in the cauldron of professional football, which they dealt with in contrasting ways. Paille, the worldlier of the two when it came to business, didn’t possess the more natural defence mechanisms which protected Cantona throughout his career. When Éric had to, he could overcome his shyness and deep-seated feelings of insecurity by harnessing his competitive instincts – what he described as his ‘fear of losing’ – whereas Paille’s game suffered in proportion to the doubts others harboured about his abilities.

  Prompted by Éric, Jacquet’s stellar but ill-balanced collection of individual talents finally found a common resolve for a few weeks. Lyon were beaten 2–0, Nantes held 1–1 at home, Toulouse vanquished 1–0 at the Stade de la Mosson, and Montpellier rose to eighth in the league. Cantona didn’t score in those games, but could easily have been chosen as man of the match on each occasion, as he deserved to be when France all but blew its last chance of qualifying for the 1990 World Cup when conceding a 1–1 draw in Norway, at the beginning of September. Paille, meanwhile, was unrecognizable as the lightly built but elusive striker who had scored over a goal every three games for Sochaux between 1982 and 1989. But it would be grossly unfair to rest Montpelliers problems on his shoulders alone.

  ‘I don’t believe Montpellier had the structure or the management to deal with what was expected of us,’ he told me. With some justification, Stéphane could identify his team’s lack of equilibrium as one of the pivotal reasons for its failure. Laurent Blanc as a number 10, anyone? Éric’s friend could see that Aimé Jacquet ‘didn’t fancy playing both of us [Paille and Cantona] together’. He could also see that the former Bordeaux manager – without malice – trusted another forward, Daniel Xuereb, more than he did a player who had taken responsibilities in the recruitment policy that aren’t normally the prerogative of a twenty-four-year-old.

  Little by little, Paille found himself pushed out of the picture, while Éric fought on like a man possessed. The golden age of the Espoirs was all but a forgotten dream, the hope to build a new Arcadia a hollow fancy. Montpellier briefly flashed in the pan with flattering victories (against Racing and Toulon), only to see every spark extinguished by disheartening defeats (Nice, Metz, Sochaux). Panic set in. There wasn’t a plot to lose any more. Mézy was dispatched to South America to watch Carlos Valderrama in a Colombia-Israel friendly. The fuzzy-haired playmaker (whom Jacquet thought ‘too slow’) would be back by 3 November at the latest, two weeks after Montpellier had been beaten again, this time 1–0 by struggling Lille. Paille’s display earned him 1 point (the lowest mark possible) in France Football’s report on the game, and the lid finally went off the pressure-cooker that was Montpellier’s dressing-room. It was no surprise to find out that the explosion had been provoked by one Éric Cantona.

  On Saturday 21 October, as the Montpellier players were trooping back to their dressing-room in the wake of their eighth defeat of their season, Jean-Claude Lemoult grumbled to Éric’s old acquaintance Michel Der Zakarian (some sources say Gérard Bernardet): ‘Can you believe it, they [Lille] only had one chance, and they put one goal past us! The problem is that we don’t score ourselves.’ Cantona misheard, or misunderstood, or simply gave way to his frustration. He sincerely believed that the diminutive midfielder (1.63m) had criticized his own strikers, the woefully out-of-form Paille and Éric himself, for not converting the opportunities they had. Four days earlier, an ugly argument between the ‘stars’ (Paille, Blanc, Júlio César, Guérin and Cantona) and the ‘water-carriers’ (Baills, Der Zakarian and Lucchesi) had already threatened to degenerate into fisticuffs. This time, Éric lost it. He hit Lemoult with his shoe, and threatened to punch his lights out. A scuffle erupted. Lemoult – rather bravely, given his size – defended himself. Once a semblance of order had been restored, Loulou Nicollin, clearly upset, addressed Éric in these terms: ‘In my fifteen years as a chairman, this is the first time one of my players has hit a teammate. It’s serious, it’s unacceptable – you’re fired.’

  The next day – a Sunday – Nicollin was called at home by Tapie; someone (but who?) had informed the OM president of the fracas. All friendliness had gone from his voice. Marseille would not have Cantona back from loan under any circumstances . . . So, who spoke? A mole within the dressing-room? Cantona’s entourage, out of spite? Or was it simply football’s bush telegraph at work?

  By Monday morning, Nicollin realized that the affair had become common knowledge, even if L’Équipe waited until Wednesday to publish the story. Surprising as it may seem, many journalists wished it to go away. A fight in a dressing-room? So what? There was one of those every weekend. Éric had been crucified before – couldn’t we just forget about it this time? Cantona had enemies, but fewer than he thought. The club’s supporters could not comprehend how Nicollin could cast away Montpellier’s hardest-working, most effective player at the precise moment when his combativeness and his goals were most needed. The chairman’s resolve wilted under pressure. He got in touch with Cantona and suggested they meet in the incongruous setting of Nicollin’s company car park, where an uneasy agreement was reached.

  On Thursday, journalists were told to arrive at the crack of dawn at the Stade de la Mosson, where the chairman of Montpellier would tell them which course of action the club had chosen to follow. Rumours were rife that a delegation of six unnamed players had demanded that Nicollin carry out his threat to dismiss Éric – even presenting him with a written petition – and that Cantona had only been saved from the chop when a counter-delegation, led by Laurent Blanc and Carlos Valderrama, issued threats of their own. Even leaving aside the fact that Valderrama had yet to come back from South America and would not play again for Montpellier until 25 November, this was a gross over-exaggeration of the storm that had engulfed Montpellier. The two days of embargo which had been observed by the press had only contributed to ‘blowing the affair out of all proportion’, as Paille, Kader Ferhaoui and Mézy all told me. The lack of reliable information only encouraged those who were, or wished to appear as if they were, ‘in the know’, to Chinese whisper allegations which everyone was inclined to believe and willing to disseminate. These would later be taken as gospel truth by British pressmen compiling catalogues of Éric’s misdemeanours. ‘Print the legend,’ as the adage goes.

  ‘Similar things happen everywhere,’ Stéphane told me. ‘In fact, there had been an almost identical incident in Montpellier the year before, and no one had said a word about it. But Éric was involved, and what happened afterwards was insane. I had to play the go-between, try and pacify everyone.’

  Didier Fèvre too had to intervene. He received a call from Isabelle, who was (not for the last time) besieged in the Cantona family home, alone with the couple’s newborn son Raphaël and a husband who didn’t know what to do with himself. ‘It’s a mess,’ she pleaded. ‘Come over!’ Didier obliged, with his paper’s blessing: the photographs would be worth the trip. He expected something out of the ordinary, but not this. Every single French television station had dispatched a crew. Cohorts of reporters and cameramen were literally camping on the pavement of the only road that led to Éric’s house, bored beyond words: th
ere hadn’t been a sign of life from the player for over forty-eight hours.

  Didier bundled his way through the throng. ‘Despite the results . . . and the stories,’ he recalls with a smile, ‘Éric was happy at Montpellier. We talked a lot, and devised a strategy to defend him. He was attacked everywhere.’ Though this is not strictly true, as we’ve seen, there were still enough people after Éric to make him and his friend feel as if they would have to fight the whole wide world. Some of the most vicious gossip originated from the Montpellier area, where local politics and football were so closely entwined that the opprobrium lavished on Cantona couldn’t fail to affect the city’s Socialist mayor and député, George Frèche, who had so lavishly – and yet entirely legally – funded the player’s loan from Marseille. ‘The club simply couldn’t afford the wages of the team,’ Didier admits, ‘and the huge amount of cash that had been spent couldn’t be justified by its results.’

  How to respond? Fèvre advised his friend to ‘show them that you are at peace with yourself’. So Éric and Isabelle opened their door, emerged in the sunlight with Raphaël’s perambulator, and had a stroll in their quartier, pretending not to notice the journalists who were pushing microphones under Cantona’s nose. Éric couldn’t resist a swipe at those who had called for his sacking. He hadn’t talked to the press for four months now. ‘What matters to me is playing,’ he said, ‘and if I must play in the street to do it, I will. It’s not up to me to make the first step. It’s not my fault if some players lack character.’

  Another visitor would soon turn up at the Cantonas’ home, presenting a letter in which Éric was informed he had been suspended by his club until 2 November. That is the decision Louis Nicollin wanted to tell the media at 8 a.m. on a weekday morning. A ten-day ban.

  Interestingly, the general public’s reaction to the whole affair was, this time, greatly in favour of Éric. Unlike David Beckham in another much-publicized incident, which English readers will be familiar with, Lemoult didn’t need to have a few stitches sewn into his brow. Almost anyone who had played football had witnessed similar scenes in their own dressing-rooms, which would be joked about around a carafe of rosé a few hours later. The almighty fuss that had erupted revealed more about the faultlines within Montpellier than about any psychotic tendency on Cantona’s part. The mediocrity of the club’s performances grated with the players’ pride: they knew, better than anybody else, how much had been expected from them at the beginning of the season. Jealousy played its part too. It was common knowledge that some of the foreign stars – Valderrama, Julio César – were earning as much as twenty – twenty! – times more than teammates like Ferhaoui, who had helped Montpellier gain promotion in 1987 and was by then a respected captain of the Algerian national team. He got by on the salary of a train driver. Éric’s violent quarrel with Lemoult crystallized tensions for which he could not be held wholly responsible. But then, that is another leitmotiv in Cantona’s progress through his footballing life. Because he did act irresponsibly at times, and rarely showed a craving for forgiveness, it was easy and convenient to blame him for ills he was as much a victim of as anyone else.

  Life without Cantona was short but eventful for Montpellier, who fought like cornered beasts against St Étienne, salvaging a 3–3 draw after being behind 0–1, 0–2 and 2–3. Could Éric’s marginalization kick-start a new beginning in this rotten campaign? Aimé Jacquet issued a warning to the absent player: ‘Either Cantona changes and comes back, or he stays the way he is, and it must be known that our life as a group will be different.’ In other words: adapt or get out. Pronouncements such as this are invariably held as evidence that the future World Cup-winning coach ‘had it in for’ Éric. This, however, is a fallacy. Jacquet, understandably, was driven by his instinct for self-preservation: his grip on Montpellier had always been fragile and was becoming looser by the day. Mézy’s Valderrama-checking mission in Colombia had rankled with him. It was a direct challenge to his authority, as was Nicollin’s decision to bring Cantona back into the fold so rapidly. Jacquet respected Éric as a man and as a player, even if their personalities had markedly little in common. But his opinion hadn’t been sought. He, too, felt pushed towards the periphery of the club.

  Whether Jacquet liked it or not, on 5 November Cantona was playing with the reserves at Bastia, and three days later had regained his place in the first XI’s starting line-up which played FC Brest. He scored in the 1–1 draw, with a superb half-volley. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Jacquet now expressed hope that it had all been for the best. ‘I could have managed his absence as I am managing his return,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling that this story, in the end, is going to bring us back together. We thought that this incident was going to lead to the shattering of our team – and we see that, with a lot of goodwill from both sides [ . . .] and, also, a good presentation of things by the chairman and Michel Mézy, it has given a new impetus to our squad.’ The manager reminded his listeners that Éric had been ‘one of the most satisfactory performers this season, especially at home’, which was a very Jacquet-like way of saying he had been the best. The manager had much harsher words for the fast-disappearing Stéphane Paille, whom he hoped would soon show ‘a truer image [of himself]’, ‘because,’ he added, ‘until now, it hasn’t been fantabulous [‘mirobolant’]’.

  Six days later, Paille was gone.

  When Paille and I talked in 2008, he had just been sacked from his managerial post at Cannes, and it is possible that some of the sadness I felt in his voice then was related to the present rather than to what had happened almost twenty years ago. But did he still feel regret?

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, unequivocally. ‘I left on a down note. I was angry with myself. With Éric, we believed [we could achieve something great], but Jacquet didn’t. But it’s all in the past. That’s football.’

  Probing that wound any further would have been like invading a very private grief, and I almost regretted asking the question in the first place. I knew what had happened afterwards. Paille left for Bordeaux, where Bez wanted him, but not the newly installed coach, Raymond Goethals, about whom much more later, as he was to wreck Éric’s homecoming at Marseille just as he blocked his friend at the Girondins. Stéphane joined Porto, failed to settle, and spent the rest of his career freelancing for a number of clubs in France, Switzerland and Scotland, where he played his last competitive game in 1997, the year of Éric’s retirement. But whereas Cantona left the game sporting yet another title with Manchester United, Paille finished fourth in the SPL with Heart of Midlothian. France never called him up again. And Éric?

  ‘We never fell out with each other. We just drifted apart, as footballers do when they have to change clubs and, in both our cases, change countries. But we’ll talk on the phone from time to time. And when we meet, it is as friends, always.’ A failure it might have been, but not a betrayal.

  Jacquet glumly admitted that Paille’s absence ‘made it easier to find a psychological balance within the group’. It also meant that the manager didn’t have to choose between Cantona, Xuereb and Paille when he decided to play with two strikers. The arrival of William Ayache, who had been part-exchanged for Stéphane, stabilized Montpellier’s defence somewhat, but the signs that the club would accomplish a stunning turnaround in the second half of the season took a while to become apparent. The only indication that something was stirring at La Mosson was the sustained quality of Éric’s displays, as if Paille’s departure had lifted him, and pushed him to claim the leader’s role that the two friends could not play together. To his surprise, maybe, he found teammates who were willing to let him show the way.

  At the beginning,’ Kader Ferhaoui told me, ‘Canto was a lone wolf, who kept himself to himself, and told others to fuck off when he felt he had to. But we learnt to tolerate and appreciate each other over time, and what we saw afterwards was du grand, du très grand Cantona.’ Before Stéphane’s departure, Éric had scored three goals in fifteen games; in the twenty-four which foll
owed, he hit the target eleven times. His strike ratio more than doubled, from 0.2 to 0.46 goals per game. Statistics do not always lie.

  Moreover, by mid-November, the faint flicker of hope that France had entertained of qualifying for Italia 90 was extinguished by Scotland (thrashed 3–0 by the French a month earlier, with Cantona on the scoresheet), who got their ticket for the Mondiale with a lacklustre draw versus Sweden. Until the end of the season, bar a handful of friendlies in which he invariably excelled,14 Cantona would be able to focus exclusively on his club.

  But the transformation of the fortunes of both club and player must, above all, be linked to the growing influence of Michel Mézy within Montpellier: ‘the man,’ Carlos Valderrama said, ‘who made us play with more freedom, more joy’. It had been noticed that the ‘general manager’ had started turning up at every training session – wearing a tracksuit. It was inevitably inferred from that that Jacquet’s position was threatened. Mézy didn’t have Jacquet’s pedigree as a coach, but he had overseen Montpellier’s return to first division football in 1987, and collected 17 caps in little over three seasons in the early 1970s, until a managerial change at the top of the French team had deprived him of what many felt should have been a great deal more call-ups. Éric and he had felt an immediate affinity with each other, of a kind totally unique in Cantona’s career. On to Oliver, Roux, Robert, Bourrier and, later, Ferguson, Éric projected his desire to find a father figure who could be admired – and trusted to defend him, whatever the circumstances. The easy-going, warm-hearted Mézy was, first and foremost, a friend. Had he been more than that, if I’m allowed to jump a year ahead in Éric’s life, Cantona would never have left Nîmes in the manner he did. He would have feared rejection, whereas he expected understanding and support. The age difference between the two men, nearly eighteen years, didn’t hamper the blossoming of their relationship, which must have puzzled Aimé Jacquet as it puzzled others. It was quite unusual for a boss (which Mézy was to Cantona) and his employee to hang out as the two men did. Neither of them saw anything odd or untoward in their complicity, and the bond they formed would be the foundation of Montpellier’s resurgence and eventual triumph.