Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Every morning, Jean-Michel, accompanied by another French journalist, Geoffroy Garitier of Le Journal du Dimanche, walked down to the breakfast room where, every morning, Éric Cantona could be found sitting down to a bowl of cereal. And every morning, the same exchange: ‘Good morning’ – ‘Good morning’ – ‘Éric, could we have a chat with you?’ – ‘No. I don’t talk.’ Then, every morning, the two reporters would drive to The Cliff, the ramshackle group of buildings and primitive pitches which couldn’t really be described as a ‘training complex’. Security was lax, consisting of a handful of ageing stewards who had probably brewed tea for Duncan Edwards, and didn’t mind strangers wandering around the car park. How things have changed. For four days, every day, Jean-Michel and Geoffroy placed slips of paper under the windscreen-wiper of Cantona’s Audi (‘Éric – can we have a chat later?’), adding their room number more in hope than in expectation. The next morning at breakfast time, Éric would appear in the hotel’s restaurant, make his way to the journalists’ table, shake their hands, say the customary ‘Ça va?’, and when they inevitably asked: ‘Can we talk to you later?’, just as inevitably reply:

  ‘No. I don’t talk.’

  This game of cat-and-mouse lasted for the full duration of Jean-Michel’s stay; beyond that, in fact. A year later, he was at The Cliff again. Éric had kept his room at the Worsley, but was also renting a house which had been occupied by Mark Hughes before him. More slips of paper placed on the windscreen, blank following blank, a routine which had become hilarious to the journalist himself. Nevertheless, one day, he wandered into the training ground’s main building, where a kind soul directed him to Alex Ferguson’s office. The manager, a Francophile, as we’ve seen, happened to cross his path on the stairs and asked him whether he would like to have a chat. How times have changed. Jean-Michel was deep in conversation with Ferguson (‘I’d pay to watch Cantona play’ was one of the manager’s most vivid quotes) when a rap was heard on the door. It was a sheepish Éric who had come to apologize for arriving late for training (not for the first time, it seems). He had spent the night at his Leeds home and been caught in an almighty traffic jam on his way from Yorkshire. Ferguson gently chided him, and recommended an alternative route. Jean-Michel popped the usual question (‘Éric – can we have a chat later?’), and, as you’ve guessed already, got the usual answer.

  ‘No. I don’t talk.’

  Comical? Certainly. There never was any animosity in Cantona’s stubborn refusal to speak, just an almost childish – quite endearing, in fact – will not to give in to defeat. The night of that game against Bulgaria had been ‘the worst in my life’, he had said – and meant it. Disciplinary problems had prevented him from helping France to qualify for the 1990 Mondiale. Euro 92 had seen a collective collapse for which no one could remember a precedent. The 1994 World Cup, which he had been so close to, had turned away like a woman offering her lips, then slamming her bedroom door shut with no explanation.

  But Cantona was also a brave man. Some of his unfortunate (or guilty) teammates had thrown in the towel. Laurent Blanc, Jean-Pierre Papin and Franck Sauzée, destroyed by the failure of Les Bleus, announced their international retirement with immediate effect. Fortunately for France, only Sauzée stuck to his word in the end. Papin rejoined the national team in March 1994, Blanc two months later, while Ginola carried on as if nothing had happened, despite Éric siding with his sacked coach in forthright terms. ‘Who is Ginola?’ he asked. ‘He played five times for France, and lost on three occasions. I’m angry with him because he’s manipulated people, because he talked bullshit to journalists so that their readers would believe him. [ . . .] If he talks to the press rather than to us, it’s because he hasn’t got any balls. Fuck it, if I was choosing the team, we’d play with twelve strikers!’ When his interviewer, Jean Issartel of France Football, expressed some surprise at Cantona’s choice of words, Éric made sure that his message to the PSG would-be model was as unequivocal as possible: ‘He’s got the technical ability. But there’s the head. You must write this down. When you let yourself be influenced like that, you’re an ass. The head doesn’t follow. He’s got every quality except this one. He’s too weak.’

  Cantona himself could not be accused of weakness. Pilloried as he had been, he applied himself to the task of salvaging as much as possible. Henri Émile, by then a trusted member of France’s coaching staff, was a privileged witness to this act of rebellion, for an act of rebellion it was, but a selfless one, for which Éric never got the credit he deserved. ‘Aimé Jacquet took the lead on what was supposed to be a temporary basis,’ Émile told me.

  Gérard Houllier and the president of the federation had gone, but all of the technical staff remained in place. Aimé and I did the rounds with the the older players, to find out who had a desire to carry on. Their disappointment was huge. Why? Because the American World Cup would be something grandiose for players who were nearing the end of their career. They could find a new stage for themselves in the USA, as we thought that the World Cup would bring on an explosion of the professional game there. And the two teams which finished above us [Bulgaria and Sweden] reached the semi-finals. We could have gone as far as that ourselves. Aimé wanted to find out which of these older players would have the motivation to pick up the challenge to qualify for Euro 96. And the first one who said: ‘We’ll go to the European championships’ was Éric – who was immediately chosen as France’s captain. Why? Because of his allure, and of how he’d been the first to accept the challenge of qualification. We needed men of courage.

  There was more to France’s astonishing defeat against Israel than was made public at the time. Embarrassing rumours had been circulating for a while in and around Clairefontaine, the superb estate which had become the national team’s headquarters five years previously. They were substantiated, but remained whispers within the upper circle of the sporting press, and, to the best of my knowledge, appear in print for the first time here. Houllier’s squad had its fair share of flamboyant characters, for whom it had become customary to slip out of the training camp under cover of night, and meet up in Chez Adam, a VIP club situated near the Champs-Elysées, whose owner was one of France’s most successful producers of pornographic videos. Footballers formed a substantial share of Chez Adam’s clientele, and it had become a tradition of sorts to organize after-match parties there – which the players called ‘dégagements’, quite an amusing term, as it turns out, since it can be translated both as ‘letting off steam’ and ‘a goalkeeper’s clearance’. These dégagements normally took place after the games, and the unwritten code of misconduct seems to have been broken on that occasion. Some of Les Bleus were said to have acted as if Israel had already been beaten, and visited Chez Adam on not one, but several consecutive nights before the match was played. They didn’t expect to be turned away at the door. Admission criteria were at the same time vague and strict, but helping a footballer to stick to an energy-saving lifestyle was not one of them. You needn’t be famous to get in, but had to know the right people, or be accompanied by one of them. Discretion was guaranteed. The girls with whom most (but not all) of the players ended up were not interested in gathering material for kiss-and-tell stories that could be sold to newspapers – French privacy laws saw to that. What’s more, journalists too were regular visitors to the club’s dimly lit salons and suites, and were unlikely to risk their own marriages or careers to find themselves on the wrong end of a libel action.

  By pure chance, I talked to a couple of former patrons of Chez Adam as I was completing this book. I was having breakfast with a Marseilles restaurateur I’d been told could put me in touch with a couple of Éric’s friends. His eyes lit up at the mention of the ‘good times’ he’d had in their company. Numerous stories followed, all of them unprintable. ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ he said. ‘There was no violence, nobody was forced to do anything against their will, and certainly not the girls. If you talk about Chez Adam, be sure of this: there was no harm done
to anyone. It was young, healthy, successful people enjoying life, laughing, drinking, joking and, yes, OK, sometimes taking one of the girls upstairs . . . but what was fascinating was that you saw these guys [the players] in situations where they had lowered all of their defences. X— was a grumpy old sod. Y— was just fantastic fun . . .’

  ‘And Éric?’ I heard myself say. ‘Did you see him there?’

  ‘Yes, once. He was different. People were doing the most outrageous things on the first floor, but he couldn’t have cared less. He remained himself. Imperious, you know, the chest like that, upright, very dignified. What he did he did with class . . . or, rather, he acted as if he wanted people to say, “Ha, he’s got class!” – there’s a difference, you see.’

  British tabloids would have paid a small fortune to find an eyewitness of the goings-on at Chez Adam. In fact, one of them got wind of the rumours at the time of Éric’s fictitious dalliance with Lee Chapman’s wife, Leslie Ash, and approached a journalist fiend of mine, who turned down their offer of £5,000 for a detailed account of Cantona’s visits to the club. That Éric had – just like his father, Le Blond’ – an eye for the ladies was hardly a secret. He was being himself, sticking to his oft-declared ‘principle’ of going wherever his impulses told him he should go, whatever the cost may be to himself and to others. In the video Éric the King, which Manchester United released in November 1993, he said: ‘I have a kind of fire inside me, which demands to be let out, and releasing it is what fuels my success. I couldn’t possibly have that fire without accepting that sometimes it wants to come out to do harm. It is harmful. I do myself harm. I am aware of doing myself harm and doing harm to others.’ These quotes resurfaced later, in the wake of his moment of madness at Selhurst Park. But Éric was not just talking about football. It was the confession of an egotist malgré lui, who had found that the only way he could live with and, yes, control his raging desires was to give vent to them. That it led him to feel remorse is beyond doubt. Éric was a genuinely generous person, who derived great joy from pleasing those he loved, the ‘good man’ that so many of those who knew him best talked to me about. His spontaneity absolved him of mere callousness – until he used it as justification for the unjustifiable. Here, as in so many aspects of his personality, the man who saw the world in black and white became a blur of grey.

  And that is why what Cantona did or did not do at Chez Adam does not matter. What is far more significant is that it gave me more proof that, contrary to what Éric has claimed so often, he couldn’t live without the football environment he despised or the players he had nothing good to say about. He might not have liked it, but he was one of them. Many teammates – Ryan Giggs, Roy Keane, Gary McAllister, to name but three – have expressed surprise at the idea that the ‘true’ Cantona was some kind of desperado who only felt at ease away from the crowd, with his dogs, his easel or a shotgun slung across his shoulders. He had been the ringleader of Auxerre’s pranksters. He organized hunting parties with OM players. He treated his Montpellier teammates to a birthday dinner, and celebrated their French Cup triumph late into the night. He climbed down a gutter to spend a night on the town in Dublin with a Leeds United teammate. He joined Manchester United’s drinking club (on his terms: champagne, rather than beer). He behaved like a seigneur at Chez Adam. Solitary and gregarious, forgiving and implacable, by turns loyal and cruel to his friends, he had barely changed from the little boy who watched Ajax, perched on Albert’s shoulders. He still longed for reassurance and warmth, and craved the togetherness that football, despite its faults and its hypocrisies, had provided him with since he could walk. When he rejected it publicly, he was also admitting a double failure. He couldn’t find a balance outside of the game. And he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. He would have to kill the footballer to become a man, a prospect he had every right to be terrified of. What and who could that man be?

  14

  The other Cantona: a dream for advertisers.

  THE CONSECRATION: 1994

  ‘Doubt? Me? Never. But I’m different. I’m a bit of a dreamer. I feel I can do everything. When I see a bicycle, I’m sure I can beat the world record and win the Tour de France.’

  Éric Cantona celebrated the first anniversary of his arrival in English football in the most appropriate manner: with another goal, his eighth in the league that season. It was at Coventry on 27 November, a game in which United’s dominance was such that they only played for fifteen minutes before shutting up shop and driving away with as emphatic a 1–0 victory as could be wished for. Phil Neal, who had just been named head coach of the defeated side, had an unusual compliment for Éric, whom he called ‘one intelligent beast of a footballer’ – an inspired oxymoron that captured the feeling of confidence oozing from his performances. A week earlier, Wimbledon had been the victims of that intelligence when he had supplied Andreï Kanchelskis and Mark Hughes with goalscoring opportunities they couldn’t miss. The Dons lost 3–1, giving United their eighth consecutive win in the league and extending their lead to 11 points. With Coventry beaten, the gap grew to 14.

  ‘[Éric] has completely confounded the critics who said he was trouble,’ Ferguson said. ‘[He is] the fulcrum of our side.’ The manifest superiority of his team didn’t reflect well on the standard of the recently formed Premier League, but said a great deal about Cantona’s capacity to spring back from France’s heartbreaking elimination from the World Cup. On the last day of November, Everton were brushed aside 2–0 at home in the fourth round of the League Cup, despite United having three goals chalked off in the last 15 minutes of the game. And when those around him were having an off-day, Éric shook them from their apathy: two more assists, the first for Giggs, the second for McClair, the culmination of a stupendous nine-pass move, ensured United salvaged a 2–2 draw against a combative Norwich at Old Trafford in early December. The only worrying sign for Ferguson was a resurgence of Éric’s indiscipline, first noticed when he was lucky to escape dismissal after kicking at Norwich defender Ian Culverhouse, who had been harrying him by fair means and foul for most of the game.

  Fans were beginning to forget when United had last lost in England. Sheffield United – destroyed 3–0 at Bramall Lane, Cantona making the most of a ‘telepathic’ pass from Ryan Giggs to conclude the scoring. A 1–1 draw at Newcastle. A 3–1 demolition of Aston Villa, the previous season’s most resilient challengers, which prompted Ron Atkinson to say: ‘The only way anyone will catch them is if the rest get six points for a win and they don’t get any.’ By 19 December United had amassed 52 points, a ‘ridiculous’ total with only half of their games played. A jubilant Cantona could claim he was now in ‘the best team [he’d] ever played for’. Atkinson had given Earl Barrett the task of following the Frenchman’s every move, the very first time an English manager had tried to negate Cantona’s influence by placing a shadow in his trail. The ploy failed, dismally. Éric scored twice. ‘He was unbelievable,’ Ferguson said. ‘Ron Atkinson has always played 4-4-2, but he changed all his principles to man-mark Éric Cantona, and you can’t get a greater accolade than that.’

  There could’ve been one, of course. Late in December, it was announced that France Football’s Ballon d’Or had been awarded to Roberto Baggio, winner of the UEFA Cup and scorer of 21 goals in 27 games for Juventus in Serie A. The European jurors had placed Éric third in their votes, the only time in his career that he ended on the podium of the most prestigious of football’s individual awards. Cantona’s pride at having been considered one of the worthiest pretenders to the trophy was obvious, but his response was remarkable for its genuine humility. He extolled the beauty of Dennis Bergkamp’s play (the Dutchman, who had just left Ajax for Internazionale, had narrowly lost to the Italian playmaker), focusing on the collective ethos of the Oranje ‘who work like crazy’. ‘The team makes the individual,’ he said. ‘It’s an exchange. You need a lot of personality to accept putting yourself at the service of someone else. The creator doesn’t exist without this t
acit agreement.’ If the Ballon d’Or jury had failed (‘gravely’, according to Éric) in one regard, it was in ignoring the claim of players in the mould of Paul Ince. ‘Guys like him make people like me shine,’ he said.

  Shine he did. It wasn’t a competition any more, but a procession, a litany. A 1–1 draw against Blackburn on Boxing Day brought United’s unbeaten run to 20 games, then 21 with a 5–2 atomization of Oldham three days later. In the 1993 calendar year, United had scored 102 points, 26 more than the second best, Blackburn, scoring 2.13 goals per game in the 1993–94 season. Statistics like these augured a long supremacy, the like of which English football hadn’t seen since Liverpool collected seven titles between 1977 and 1984, and it was confidently predicted that 1994 would see a confirmation of that trend. That wasn’t quite the case, however.

  A drop in form had to check United’s progress at some stage, but it’s fair to say that no one saw it coming. The 0–0 they brought back from Eiland Road on New Year’s Day didn’t constitute much of a surprise. Five of the six ‘Roses’ derbies which had taken place since Leeds regained elite status in 1990 had ended in draws and, after dicing with relegation in the months following Éric’s departure, Howard Wilkinson’s side had rediscovered some of its former grit and efficiency, and spent most of the autumn solidly installed in the pack chasing United. Cantona was given the reception he could expect from the crowd, as well as a robust welcome by Chris Fairclough, who frustrated him so much that Éric was very lucky not to be dismissed for a stamp on the defender. Another bad foul forced referee David Elleray to caution him, but Cantona was by then playing with a persistent, silent fury. The official chose to give him a lengthy lecture when he could easily have produced another yellow card later in that game. Not all his colleagues would be prepared to show the same leniency in the coming months. Éric’s bad-tempered display gave Wilkinson a chance to have a dig at his former player: ‘He is the same player on a different stage, in different circumstances,’ he said. ‘When he was on my stage, we were losing football matches. Those were not performances conducive to the way he played, so I left him out, he didn’t like it, and he asked to go.’ In other words, put Cantona in a winning team, and he’ll look like a world-beater; but don’t count on him when the wind is not blowing fair any more.