Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Éric was lucky. The tone of the Leeds dressing-room was struck by what the English call ‘honest’ players, decent, generous-minded men who did whatever they could to accommodate the brooding foreigner. What’s more, the Scottish contingent which had long been prominent in the club of Bobby Collins and Billy Bremner, and to which belonged Strachan and McAllister, the two natural leaders of the squad, held no prejudice against a representative of the Auld Alliance, unless it was a favourable one. A moot point? Most certainly not, if one thinks ahead to the complicity that would be a hallmark of the relationship between Alex Ferguson and Cantona: together against les Anglais, the Auld Enemy.

  According to McAllister, language didn’t prove as much of a barrier as outsiders feared it might be. ‘His English wasn’t that bad, you know!’ he told me. ‘I think he chose his time to let you know that . . . but he joined in the banter. He understood the British dressing-room humour very quickly, the taking the mickey . . . The players made a big effort to put him at ease, and that’s one of the reasons he settled in so quickly.’

  Their support extended beyond the privacy of the training ground. Strachan used his regular column in the Post to defend Éric’s decision (‘quite a gifted player’) to leave Sheffield Wednesday: ‘He is of course a seasoned international, which, for me, makes it difficult to understand how anyone anywhere could really ask a player such as Éric to go anywhere for a trial. I cannot see a British player of a similar standing ever agreeing to go to an overseas club on a week’s trial.’ Gary Speed enthused just as publicly about the tremendous impression the recruit had made: ‘he’s big and strong, very dangerous in the air and packs a good shot’ – quite a compliment coming from one of the fiercest strikers of the ball at the club.

  The Leeds supporters lapped up the praise their Frenchman was receiving, and couldn’t read or hear enough about the club’s most exotic recruit since the arrival of black South African Albert Johanneson in 1961. Barely a day passed without a mention of Cantona in the Post, who were granted the rare privilege of a one-to-one interview with the player on 7 February, so rare a privilege, in fact, that this revealing article would be one of only two such pieces published in English until Éric left Manchester United and England in May 1997. I use the adjective ‘revealing’ with a caveat; for what was so revealing in the conversation Éric had with journalist Mike Casey was not so much his answers as the questions he was asked, only one of which had to do with football.

  The interpreter was a young Yorkshirewoman named Julie Halford, who was predictably wowed by the Frenchman, and became the subject of an interview herself. Such was Éric’s aura that even those who merely talked with him were deemed worthy of being talked to themselves. ‘Speaking with Cantona,’ she said, ‘is more like taking part in The South Bank Show than in Match of the Day.’

  How could it be otherwise? Éric’s legend went before him. The Post and its readership were interested in this mythical creature, an accretion of second-hand anecdotes and unverifiable rumours, which Cantona did nothing to refute on that occasion. He philosophized (‘I am only considered mad in today’s society. I think in an ideal society, I would be considered normal’), lifted a corner of the tapestry that concealed him (‘It bothers me if I’m recognized, and it bothers me if I’m not’), only to let it fold back in place with half-serious gnomisms about his personality (‘I don’t like looking at myself in the mirror. I always wonder who is the person I’m looking at’). The arrangement suited all parties. The press and the general public got the story they craved, while Éric retained his quant-à-soi, and could find some kind of peace in the bubble he had created for himself. Protected by his eccentricities, both knowing and sincere, he could position himself safely in the distance, aware that no one would seek to approach him too closely. Had they chosen to do so, they would have had trouble recognizing the chimera of their imagination in the flesh-and-blood Marseillais who traded dirty words with his teammates in the communal bath. Éric welcomed this cautiousness. ‘I like the mentality of the English,’ he said. ‘They are warm and reserved at the same time. They give you respect. I like that.’

  The relief Cantona felt at leaving the turmoil of the previous months behind alleviated the loneliness of his new life in Leeds. Isabelle and Raphaël had stayed behind in the South of France, and would only join him once it became a certainty that the club wished to retain him on a long-term contract. With the exception of Wilkinson and Chapman (who was considered an ‘intellectual’ of the English game, as he had passed an impressive number of O- and A-levels), the people who surrounded him spoke almost no French. Éric had met his captain Gordon Strachan once before, but on the field of play only, when France and Scotland had come head-to-head in a World Cup qualifier two-and-a-half years previously. Everywhere he looked, Éric saw the faces of strangers. Still, all did their best to put the newcomer at ease, with some success.

  ‘Everyone seemed to take to him straightaway,’ Gary Speed told Rob Wightman. ‘The way the Leeds dressing-room was then, they would have welcomed anyone. That’s one reason why we won the title, because of that. First of all he came over on his own and we socialized a lot – that was the way to get to know him. [ . . .] We just tried our hardest to welcome him in and he seemed to thrive on that and it really showed on the pitch.’

  The Leeds supporters played their part too. The excitement surrounding Éric’s arrival at Eiland Road was such that, on 8 February, 5,000 of them made the (admittedly short) trip to Oldham in the hope of seeing the debut of the player the Sunday Mirror had already nicknamed ‘Le Brat’. The result came as a disappointment to them – Oldham prevailed 2–0 – but their wish had been granted. A calf injury sustained by Steve Hodge in the first half led Wilkinson to usher Cantona onto the field after the interval, much earlier than his manager had planned. In truth, Éric did not see much of the ball that afternoon, and spent most of the game’s last 45 minutes watching it sail above his head. He touched it less than a dozen times, still attempting a few of his party tricks (a backheel, a bicycle kick) when it finally got to his feet, but, apart from a weak header which hardly troubled goalkeeper Jon Hallworth, failed to exert any influence on the encounter. Leeds’s defeat had highlighted not so much what Cantona could bring to the club than what it was missing when Lee Chapman, who had broken a wrist in January, could not provide a focal point for his team’s attacks.

  ‘I found it physical to play in,’ Éric told a France Football reporter at the final whistle, acknowledging that he had ‘had a bad day. But the only surprise was that Leeds lost. After one week in Sheffield and one week in Leeds, I knew that the tempo was high here. I was expecting it. I had prepared myself for it.’ The assessment he made of his own performance showed a Cantona who was able to take a step back and view his future with calmness and equanimity. ‘I think I’ll have fun here,’ he said, and for two reasons: he believed that skilful footballers could create space for themselves despite the frantic pace of the action; and, crucially, the bond between players and fans was closer than anything he had experienced before. ‘I’ve never felt like playing in cold stadiums,’ he said, ‘where spectators are 30 metres away from the pitch. I lose myself in that empty space.’ It would take time to adapt, of course, but he was willing to show patience and humility. ‘I’ll understand more with each day that passes. It’s the same for the language. It won’t be harder, it’ll be just as difficult. To learn is always difficult.’

  Éric applied himself to the task of ‘learning’ with a single-mindedness and a modesty that won his teammates over. His dedication in training (which, later on, would have such an impact on the youngsters coming through the ranks at Manchester United) provided another proof of his desire to blend in. Unusually for the time, a number of Leeds players, Gary McAllister among them, used to stay on the pitch after practice sessions to work on free-kick routines, shots at goal and the like, as Cantona had always done himself. ‘Sessions’ of a different kind regularly followed in various watering holes (p
referably in the countryside, away from Wilkinson’s gaze), in which Éric could relax all the more easily given that his drinking companions accepted that he sometimes needed to withdraw into his own world. He wanted to be left alone? So what? Let him do it. He wasn’t sulking. He had just left his country and his family behind him, for goodness sake. As Gary Speed said: ‘I don’t think you’d ever pin him down. You couldn’t say, Éric, come out for a drink, mate! Sometimes he was just there. He was his own person.’ Cantona appreciated the attention he was given a great deal, but appreciated even more the freedom he was granted to be himself. As McAllister told me: ‘Éric is a player who responds to being accepted; sometimes, it’s about a bit of love, and he had that at Leeds United.’

  Leeds then embarked on a short trip to Ireland, where they beat Irish champions Shelbourne 2–0 in front of 10,000 spectators, most of whom had bought their tickets to see Éric in the flesh. Cantona ‘turned on the style’, according to a fawning report in the local press, hitting the post with a fearsome 20-yard drive. But ‘the wild man of French football’ (another telling Post headline) still had to make his first appearance at Eiland Road. He did so on 15 February, on the very day Isabelle unpacked her cases in their new home near Roundhay Park, where Éric would sometimes play football with his son Raphaël once the young family settled there for good later in the spring.20 Leeds had invited Swedish champions IFK Gothenburg to take part in a friendly which attracted fewer than 6,000 spectators to a stadium that could accommodate five times that number. There would have been even fewer, of course, had Cantona not played. The game itself (which United lost 1–0) would have remained a dispensable footnote in the story of Éric’s season, had not a solitary fan started chanting ‘Ooh-aah, Cantona!’ after a deft flick from the new folk hero. Part of the crowd (some of whom had turned up wearing Breton shirts, berets and the obligatory string of onions) joined in spontaneously, and one of the most famous terrace songs of the 1990s was born.21

  Cantona fever spread at a barely credible speed within two weeks of Éric’s arrival at Leeds. New words were put to the old Leeds anthem ‘Marching on Together’. ‘Marchons ensemble’ didn’t scan perfectly, but was great fun to sing. A young couple was said – in all likelihood apocryphally – to have christened their new-born with the middle name Cantona. The fervour displayed so dramatically in the stands (and which turned to hysterical hatred once Éric left for Manchester United) intrigued a sociology PhD student from the University of Salford named Anthony C. King to such an extent that he published a paper on the topic of The Problem of Identity and the Cult of Éric Cantona several years later (in 1995). Deconstruction in football would normally be a jocular euphemism for tackling à la Joey Barton. King, now head of the Philosophy and Sociology Department at Exeter University, applied this methodology with rather more finesse. He made a strong case for understanding the ‘cult of Cantona’ as a collective crystallization of a number of frustrations, urges and fantasies peculiar to the working class of that part of England, which were then externalized through ritualistic channels familiar to anyone who inhabits the football world. The fans clad in replica shirts and Leeds scarves repeating the simple but insistent rhythm of ‘Ooh-ah Cantona’ ad infinitum on their way to Eiland Road . . . give them orange robes, and they may as well chant the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra down Oxford Street.

  I put some of King’s insights to Leeds supporters, and was surprised by how willing they were to accept them as valid (but not demeaning) interpretations of their own behaviour. ‘Leeds fans did not merely admire Cantona’s manliness or his style,’ for example, ‘but loved him in the way that someone might love their partner.’ (In some cases, more than their partner, as the story of one such fan, Gary King, will show later in this book.) The Salford student argued that this emotional transfer was facilitated by the stereotypical view the English held of the French as red-hot lovers, as I found out to my embarrassment when I arrived in England myself (‘Oh, I do love your accent!’).

  More intriguingly, as King rightly remarked, some groups of Leeds fans (whose opinions were echoed in the fanzine Marching on Together) had launched a number of anti-racist initiatives in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They saw in Cantona’s Frenchness a means to assert their own aspirations to cosmopolitanism. This was not the easiest of tasks in a city still reeling from the effects of Thatcherite vandalism, and which had a long way to go before it reinvented itself as a thriving service centre, complete with the first branch of Harvey Nichols outside London. The left-leaning terrace dissidents aimed to achieve supremacy over the hooligan element that had tarnished the club’s image for two decades already. Thanks to Éric, King wrote, ‘the fans were able to distinguish Leeds as a team, symbolically represented by Cantona, that was different and superior [more skilful, more seductive] to the rest of the English league’. It was an extraordinary reversal of the xenophobic values which were and still are attached to the Leeds support, in which Éric played a function he had no control of whatsoever. I’ve often referred to the mythical dimension of Cantona, but a psychoanalyst might rather use the word ‘fantasmatic’, as the object of adoration was idealized to such a degree that his performances became – almost – incidental to his worshippers. Howard Wilkinson might not have put things in quite these terms, but was nonplussed all the same. He could live with the aggrandizement of one of his players (which Cantona did absolutely nothing to encourage) as long as his own authority remained unchallenged. It would take a matter of months before he felt it was endangered to the point that a parting of ways presented him with the only opportunity to carry on doing his job as he saw fit.

  Éric had played 45 minutes of competitive football since throwing the ball at a referee in December of the previous year, but such was the regard Michel Platini held him in that he did not hesitate to field him from the start in a prestigious friendly held in, of all places, Wembley Stadium, where goals by Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker gave England a flattering 2–0 victory over France on 19 February. Cantona featured for the full 90 minutes, and should have won a penalty when Mark Wright stopped his very first shot at goal with both hands. Most observers agreed that his return to international football had been a success; the one-eyed Yorkshire Post even went as far as illustrating its match report with a photograph of the Frenchman that dwarfed the picture of Lineker scoring his 47th goal for England – which put the Spurs centre-forward within two strikes of Bobby Charlton’s all-time record for the national team. And when the players made their way out of the dressing-room, English or French, the gaggle of journalists converged on just one of them: Éric Cantona, who else?

  Hardly any questions concerned the game itself, which is all the more surprising since both teams had been drawn in the same group in the forthcoming European Championships. But journalists, British as well as French, were after Éric’s impressions d’Angleterre. ‘England is just as I expected after watching your game on television in France,’ he told the former. ‘It’s very quick and positive, and the ball is moved to the forwards as fast as possible. Most French players wouldn’t like that, because they prefer to play through midfield, but for a striker like me, I like to get the ball early, and that’s what’s happening, so I’m enjoying myself.’

  In truth, Éric had not yet adjusted to the pace of English football, as was shown when Leeds drew 1–1 at Everton the following weekend, an encounter which also marked Cantona’s first live appearance on national British television. Howard Wilkinson sought to temper the expectations of the public when facing ITV’s cameras after the match. ‘Éric has a lot in his favour,’ he said. ‘He’s big, strong and fit and has a terrific build so he can compete easier [sic] than, say, someone of five foot nought. And, most important this, it seems he wants to succeed. I’m sure he will. But it’s up to him.’ It was a fair assessment of Cantona’s contribution. A goal had eluded him – just – after he had skipped past the challenges of Dave Watson and Matthew Jackson to find himself with just Everton’s ’keeper Neville So
uthall to beat, only to see see his shot shave the Welsh international’s far post. But apart from that, Cantona hadn’t posed a real threat to the visitors.

  Wilkinson was understandably reluctant to alter his system for the sake of a late recruit, and feared that throwing the footballer-artist into the cauldron of first division football head first would lead to burn-out. In fairness, the manager had informed the player of his intentions from the outset of their relationship. Later on, once Cantona’s match-winning ability had become obvious to all, the Yorkshireman’s reluctance to deviate from his plans would bring accusations of pig-headedness. In late February, however, it simply demonstrated that he was coherent enough in his thinking to make Cantona’s introduction to English football as smooth and trouble-free as possible. Éric himself seemed happy with the walk-on parts Wilkinson gave him; he realized that, following his two-month suspension, he still lacked match fitness and couldn’t be expected to waltz in and lead Leeds to victory through the sheer magnitude of his talent.

  The goal he and thousands of Leeds fans had been praying for came six days later, against Luton Town at Eiland Road, when Cantona stepped off the bench after Tony Dorigo sustained an injury on the half-hour mark. Éric was told to move upfield and position himself alongside Lee Chapman, whose convalescence had ended at last. McAllister pierced the Hatters’ defence and side-footed the ball, which Cantona coolly placed in an empty net. Late in the game the finisher turned provider as he headed the ball towards the unmarked Chapman, who rifled his shot past Steve Sutton. Two-nil to Leeds. Gordon Strachan spoke for the whole of the Leeds dressing-room when he said: ‘We do not really mind who scores the goals for us just so long as someone does, but in this case, we were really just as delighted for Éric himself.’ He added: ‘It cannot have been easy for him trying to settle in a completely different environment while attempting to come to terms with a different style of play as well as having a language problem. But we have a lot of time for him and we have been very impressed with the way he has tackled the problems.’ Éric would play more spectacular games for Leeds, but would rarely prove as decisive as he was on that Saturday, 29 February 1992. The maverick had chosen the rogue day of a leap year to open his account in English football.