The ‘flashy foreigner’ had shown how he could master what were supposed to be alien conditions. ‘I’ve always had this feeling I was protected by something, I don’t know why,’ he said afterwards. ‘And confidence brings the freedom to express yourself, and freedom to express yourself brings genius, euphoria, fire.’ You could read that euphoria on Éric’s face after he netted the first of his 82 goals for Manchester United. And he had another gift: the capacity to share the pure joy of scoring, so obvious, so fresh in these first games. Come the next training session, fans were queueing up at The Cliff, where Éric made it a point of honour to sign autographs for everyone present. ‘You have to do it,’ he said. ‘It’s not like that in France. The fans are not like that either. I sometimes refused to sign autographs in France; I have criticized the [French] public violently, because there is no love, no passion. They never give anything, and want you to give in return.’ In Manchester, as they had done in Leeds, they gave a lot, and it would take Cantona the best part of quarter of an hour to walk the few yards that separated the exit of the training facilities and the players’ car park. Things have changed since then. A fan turning up at the gates of the Carrington complex today will be ushered off none too gently by a security guard, while the stars drive away in ostentatious anonymity behind black-tinted car windows. Cantona, in so many ways a herald for the cult of football celebrities, still belonged to a more innocent age.
It couldn’t be a coincidence that United’s fortunes had taken a turn for the better since Éric’s arrival. Norwich’s surprising 2–0 loss at home to Ipswich on 21 December gave the Reds a chance to emerge during the Christmas period as serious title contenders for the first time. On Boxing Day, Cantona helped salvage a miraculous 3–3 draw at Sheffield Wednesday, for whom his former Marseille teammate Chris Waddle had been on fire. Twenty minutes before the final whistle, United were as good as dead, trailing by three goals, before the Frenchman engineered a late, desperate rally, offering two goals to Brian McClair and scoring the third himself at the second attempt. Lee Sharpe had given a superb exhibition of wing play, but all the talk in the dressing-room was of Cantona, who had transformed the game, and was already well on his way to transforming the team.
Many were surprised by how well Mark Hughes, a very intense man with a keen (but not inflated) sense of his own worth, was connecting with a player who was supposed to be in direct competition with him for a place in Ferguson’s starting line-up. When Coventry were crushed 5–0 at Old Trafford forty-eight hours later, the Welsh centre-forward, who couldn’t buy a goal before Éric’s transfer, had scored his third in as many games since the Frenchman’s arrival. Cantona himself (who also laid on a perfect pass for Lee Sharpe to tap in from six yards) had been chosen to take a penalty for the fourth goal after Phil Babb had handled the ball, and dispatched it with remarkable coolness, given that it was the first time he had been granted such a privilege in England. It said a great deal about his growing influence on the team and the regard in which his manager held him already.
Describing those early days at Old Trafford and the immediate impact he had on those around him, Cantona later said:
I loved to pass the ball where nobody expected it, provided it produced a result. The game becomes more fluid, more surprising. When you know how to do that, you have ten times more possibilities, because the players around you know that you can put the ball anywhere at any time. So, they look for spaces. Mark Hughes loved to receive the ball with his back to goal and give it back – we could combine in small places. Roughly speaking, Manchester’s game plan was: use Hughes as a focal point, I get the ball back, and before I’ve even received it, the two wingers have already started their run.
But Éric could just as easily have spoken of himself as his team’s focal point, and not only on the field of play, where his teammates would look to him to provide the beat of their attacks; the press too – quite literally – focused on the big, fast, skilful Frenchman: every single United report The Times had printed since his arrival at Old Trafford featured an action shot of Éric. When Ferguson’s men opened the 1993 calendar year with a relaxed 2–0 win over third division Bury in the FA Cup, it had been a young Northern Irishman named Keith Gillespie who had provided them with inspiration and goals, but it was still Éric’s frame that loomed the largest in the accompanying photograph – as it did when Tottenham were added to the list of his victims five days later. This time, no one could doubt who had been the catalyst of a 4–1 victory that sent United to the top of the league on goal difference. ‘Ferguson’s team boasts many outstanding individuals,’ wrote the reporter of a London daily, ‘but only one genuine star: Cantona, of course.’ A header gave Éric his fourth goal in six league games, after which he set up Dennis Irwin with a superb pass, and United strolled to the finishing post.
His exhibition had been witnessed by the only British player whom Éric counted among his footballing heroes: George Best, whose path he crossed for the first time that day. The two men exchanged a glance, a smile and a nod; neither needed words to acknowledge the presence of a kindred spirit. Best, a much sharper judge of the game than he was sometimes credited for, naturally devoted his next column to Cantona. ‘If he keeps doing it, this club is going to win the title,’ he predicted. ‘That’s how important he is to United. He has given this team a brain. I honestly had my doubts about him fitting in, but he has convinced me that – at just £1.1m [Éric actually cost £100,000 more] – he is Alex Ferguson’s shrewdest signing.’ Statistics bore this judgement out. Before Éric’s arrival, United had managed just four goals in nine games. In the nine since he joined, they had scored twenty-two. Cantona had unlocked his team’s attacking potential; he had also given them an impetus that was carried through to their next fixture, a 3–1 win at QPR on 16 January, despite his missing the trip to London through injury. His absence was brief: he didn’t feature in a routine qualification for the fifth round of the FA Cup at the expense of another modest team, Brighton & Hove Albion, and resumed playing eleven days later, as if he had been there all along at the heart of United’s purring engine.
Nottingham Forest conceded only two goals, the second of which Éric had created by volleying a pass to Mark Hughes, but it could have been many, many more. ‘Our game was superbly tuned,’ Cantona later said of the first of his many purple patches. ‘We didn’t have to adapt to the opposition. [Before the games], he [Ferguson] spoke more about details, whether a ’keeper didn’t like the ball on the ground, what was the weaker side of a defender. But he always ended up his talks by saying: “And now, enjoy yourselves.” Have fun. It’s a magnificent thing to say, because you’ve worked throughout the week, and everything has been done for you to have fun.’
And what fun they were having – their fans, too. Just as Leeds had fallen in love with Éric at first sight, Manchester, or at least half of it, took to its French talisman from the outset, re-appropriating the Kop’s famous ‘Ooh-ah Cantona’ (one supporter, Giorgina Williams, even took the trouble of teaching the chant to her parrot Rodney; another named a yearling after it – the horse won a race at Redcar in June 1993 despite odds of 12/1) and unfurling the tricolour in the Old Trafford stands. Twelve games had passed since United had last conceded defeat, and bookmakers had now installed them as joint favourites for the title. Only Ron Atkinson’s flamboyant Aston Villa possessed the strength in depth to pose a real threat over the four remaining months of the season. Norwich, for all their neat interplay, were felt to lack the steel required to be champions. Moreover, United were ready and willing to strengthen an already formidable line-up and, come February, Alex Ferguson was alerted to the possible availability of a twenty-one-year-old Irishman who had made himself the fulcrum of Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest: Roy Keane. Keane was dallying over extending his stay at the City Ground, and insisted on adding escape clauses to a new contractual agreement. It was not a question of if, but when United would pounce with an offer Clough could not refuse. In the end, Fer
guson would have to wait until the summer to get his man, but another seed of his club’s future dominance had been sown.
United stuttered briefly at the very end of January, dropping three points at Ipswich (1–2), where Cantona was subjected to the kind of all-out assault that led a fast-diminishing group of doubters to reflect that he could still wilt under the physical pressures of English football; but he had also added another assist to his collection (for Brian McClair this time), and when Sheffield United visited Old Trafford a week later, the scoreline was reversed, Éric getting his fifth goal in nine starts for Alex Ferguson. Not much attention was given to that game, however. The talk was already of the next fixture, which would pit the Mancunians against another Yorkshire side. Cantona was coming back to Eiland Road.
Éric had some idea of what was in store for him – but even the threatening messages that had been delivered to his Roundhay home (and caused Isabelle to fear for her family’s safety) failed to make him realize what vicious hostility his name now inspired in Leeds. Had he done so, he mightn’t have bothered writing an open letter to his former fans (according to a contemporary report), in which he assured them that he still cherished the club, its manager and its supporters. His emergence from the United coach seventy-five minutes before kick-off sparked a torrent of insults, which carried on unabated throughout the day. As The Times put it, ‘Hatred in this guise – pure, fist-clenching, foul-mouthed and incessant – required no translation.’ Two days previously, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Munich air disaster, Leeds had travelled to Selhurst Park to play Wimbledon. To many of the travelling supporters, the game had meant very little; they were already thinking of Manchester United’s visit, rehearsing for the hatefest of Cantona’s return. A chant went round: ‘Happy Birthday, dear Munich.’ Then, on 8 February, shortly before the two teams lined up on the Eiland Road pitch, an inflatable plane was bounced round the Kop. The banner that greeted Éric – ‘FOUTRE LE CAMP, CANTONA’ (‘Fuck off, Cantona’ in schoolboy French) – looked tame in comparison, and in truth, Cantona was far more shocked by the Munich chants than by the abuse he had to suffer personally. Several years on, when asked what he had felt during these ninety minutes of unending abuse, it is the ugliness of the Munich chants that came back to his mind. They had had a numbing effect on him. ‘Nothing could touch me,’ he said. ‘I knew I would get a hot reception. I expected it. If I’d been a Leeds suppporter, I would probably have reacted the same way. It was not a surprise.’ But other Manchester United players – Ryan Giggs was one – had far more difficulty coping with the experience: ‘The crowd’s hostility towards him was evil, and we were all just happy to get away from the place safe and sound,’ the Welshman said.
Typically, Éric felt compelled to show how little effect the insults had on him. Was he provoking the crowd? Not necessarily. Expressing a lack of concern was a means to defend himself. So, during the warm-up, and with the Kop already in full, filthy voice, he had been the last Manchester United player to leave the field. My friend David Luxton – a Leeds fan – was in the stands that day, directly behind the goal at which Éric was aiming his shots in practice. When the moment came to return to the dressing-room, drowned in an ocean of noise, a sewer in full flow, Cantona took the ball, juggled it for a while and signed off with a volley to the top corner. The jeers redoubled in ferocity but, as David remembers it, intensified by the admiration the crowd couldn’t help but feel for such arrogance (‘We had to admit it – this guy had balls’). His former teammates – who felt no animosity towards him – had been impressed too. ‘He was like he had always had been,’ Gary McAllister told me, ‘his shoulders back, and his chest forward, with the arrogance of a gunslinger.’
The gunslinger fired blanks, though. The game petered out to a goalless draw, the result the police (and the management of both clubs) had hoped for. Éric contributed little himself, save a dribble past two defenders followed by a shot which goalkeeper John Lukic easily parried with his legs. He was also shown a yellow card – a ‘soft’ caution, which punished a nudge off the ball on John Newsome. The wall of hate of the Kop rose a bit higher for a few seconds, and that was that. He could now turn his mind back to football, which had been a mere sideshow in Eiland Road’s theatre of hate. This meant rejoining the French national team, which was due to play Israel in Tel-Aviv in a World Cup qualifier nine days later.
Éric’s call-up couldn’t have come at a better time. He badly needed some fresh air after breathing the poisonous atmosphere of Eiland Road. His absence was undoubtedly detrimental to United, who were surprisingly dumped out of the FA Cup by Sheffield United while he readied himself to celebrate his thirtieth cap. Euro 92 was by now but a bad memory, pushed further back in his mind by the very real hope of achieving qualification for the 1994 World Cup. A relaxed Cantona found time to mix with journalists in the familiar environment of Clairefontaine. At peace with himself, he also expressed himself fully on the field of play. Gérard Houllier deployed an enterprising 4-3-3 formation in which Éric, positioned slightly deeper than usual, supported striker Jean-Pierre Papin with Patrice Loko and David Ginola occupying the flanks. This was a role not dissimilar to the one he had been given by Alex Ferguson at United: he had the freedom to roam wherever his instinct took him, and scored a superbly judged opening goal, sliding in at the far post to volley home Didier Deschamps’ long, raking pass. The only blot on a near-perfect copybook was a caution that would prevent him from taking part in France’s next game, a trickier trip to Austria in March (Les Bleus would indeed struggle in Vienna without Cantona’s vision, and only just prevailed thanks to a strike by Papin).
It’s true that some indiscipline was creeping back into his game. Back in England, another booking (his third in three matches for club and country) in a 2–1 win over Southampton triggered an automatic two-match suspension, which forced him to sit out two crucial away games in March, of which United won the first – against Liverpool – and lost the supposedly easier second against a sprightly Oldham. This was Cantona’s first ban in English football. Hardly anyone noticed it, though: the challenges that had been punished were clumsy or petulant rather than malicious, and by the time United had whipped Middlesbrough 3–0 on 27 February, the talk was of another stupendous performance of which my friend Michael Henderson, a journalist with the Guardian at the time, was an admiring witness and an inspired laudator. ‘Cantona will never look natural in English football,’ he wrote. ‘Craftsmen rarely do. There is something of the poet in his disdain for the clutter around him, and he is selfless enough to furnish others with many of his best lines.’
I reminded Michael of the aptness of his remarks many years later. This ‘unnaturalness’ has often been mistaken for an inability to adapt, I told him, and he had been one of the only Englishmen I had met who understood that so early in Éric’s United career. ‘Did I write that?’ Michael chuckled. ‘That was quite good.’ Yes it was, and so was what followed. ‘No ball is too difficult either to stun or to lay off,’ he continued, ‘so he is an ideal conduit for others to play through, seeing the possibilities earlier than they do and having the facility to achieve these aims.’ That day, had it not been for the excellence of Stephen Pears (a Manchester United reject) in the Boro goal, Éric would have finished with the third hat-trick of his English career. He had to be content with a solitary goal instead, United’s third, his last contribution to his team’s pursuit of the title before his ban was activated.
When he returned to action, on 14 March, two clubs shared the lead in the league table: United – and Aston Villa, whose next game was to be played at Old Trafford, to the delight of the satellite broadcasters. Andreï Kanchelskis made way for Éric, whose majestic performance drew comparisons with the way Dennis Viollet used to orchestrate United’s attacks when Matt Busby was at the helm. Ron Atkinson’s team exuded confidence to start with and took the lead through Steve Staunton, before Cantona headed a Dennis Irwin cross towards Hughes, who obliged with an equalizer; 1�
��1 it stayed despite Cantona’s displaying tremendous stamina and imagination, only to be stifled by an inspired Mark Bosnich in the Villa goal. Perhaps as a consequence of their superiority going unrewarded on that occasion, a subdued United couldn’t shake off their collective torpor when a strangely passionless Manchester derby finished with an identical scoreline. Éric, as profligate as any of his teammates in the first half, redeemed himself with a fine equalizing header towards the end of the game, but United’s run had been checked, and a third consecutive draw – 0–0 at Arsenal, where David Seaman did well to deny Cantona when he swivelled and shot at goal in a single movement – brought fears of a repeat of the previous season, when Leeds had been able to exploit United’s nervousness in the final furlong. Fortunately for Alex Ferguson, Norwich did his team a good turn by beating Villa 1–0 on the same day. United hadn’t won in four matches but were still very much in contention, trailing the Norfolk side by a single point with a game in hand – and their next game would take place at Carrow Road, where a victory would see them leapfrog the leaders once again.
The radio was on in the coach taking United to the stadium, and brought them news of Villa’s win at Nottingham Forest shortly before their own kick-off. ‘We had no choice but to win in Norwich,’ Éric explained later, ‘otherwise we’d be four points behind. That was the turning point. We played a perfect game. We played perfect football.’ This could have been a royal ‘we’, as Cantona, ‘so marvellously cool in control, so rapid of eye’, to quote one of many mesmerized reporters, engineered United’s resurgence with his eagerness as well as his artistry. The first Mancunian goal demonstrated Éric’s ability to set and alter the rhythm of play as a conductor induces legato in a musical phrase. He held the ball just long enough for Ryan Giggs to move onside, receive what was not so much a pass as an offering, and round the Norwich keeper to establish a lead. The third saw him in the guise of a finisher, converting a straightforward chance from Paul Ince’s selfless lay-off: his eighth successful strike in seventeen games for United. Norwich lost 3–1 and, with six games still to play, it came down to a single question: who, of United and Villa, could best withstand the pressure?
Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King Page 30