Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  The final was wrapped up in less than ten minutes, after an hour of play. Before that, Glenn Hoddle’s team had proved dogged and resourceful opponents, frequently threatening to pierce United’s defence with their quick interpassing. Then, in the 60th minute, Eddie Newton committed a dreadful foul on Dennis Irwin right in front of referee Mike Riley, who immediately pointed to the penalty spot. The Chelsea players had no right to feel aggrieved by the decision, but, as Cantona picked up the ball to place it there, one of them, Dennis Wise (who else?), walked up and started remonstrating with the Frenchman – or so the television viewers and commentators thought. Wise intended to disrupt Éric’s concentration, there could be no doubt about that, but the method he had chosen to do that was highly original. He asked Cantona: ‘Fancy a bet?’ to which Éric replied, ‘Yes – £100,’ before waving him off with a dismissive gesture of the hand. What with Wise’s intervention, and Riley and Cantona taking turns to replace the ball on the spot, the execution of the referee’s sentence took over a minute-and-a-half.

  The last two penalties awarded on FA Cup final day at Wembley had been saved, but Dimitri Kharine could do nothing about Éric’s kick. He struck the ball almost nonchalantly with the inside of his right boot, as if he had been practising on the training ground. Barely five minutes later, the Double became a near certainty when Riley blew his whistle again, this time after Andreï Kanchelskis had come off worst in a shoulder-to-shoulder challenge in the box. Wise’s teammates remonstrated furiously, and not without justification this time, but there was no bet on that occasion (Wise settled his wager at the exit of the dressing-rooms). Éric waited for the tumult to die down, teed the ball – and sent Kharine the wrong way, placing his shot (more a pass into the goal, in fact) precisely in the same spot, to the left of the Russian ’keeper. ‘Do not play poker with that man,’ as a columnist wrote the next morning. The eerie similarity between the two penalty kicks had something almost comical about it. ‘Whatever you do,’ Éric seemed to imply, ‘we’ll beat you on our terms, and there is nothing you can do about it,’ which summed up this match perfectly. Chelsea, who showed tremendous spirit throughout, could have played until dusk without scoring, whereas every United move in the second half looked as if it would be concluded with a goal. Éric was only inches away from equalling Stan Mortensen’s record of a hat-trick at this stage of the competition, but placed his angled shot in Kharine’s side-netting instead. It didn’t matter: Hughes capitalized on a defensive mix-up to make it 3–0 in the dying seconds. Then Éric initiated the best move of the game from a Chelsea corner. His superbly timed pass reached Mark Hughes as he was racing towards the halfway line. The Welshman had spotted Paul Ince driving forward, and prolonged the course of the ball in his unimpeded path. Ince rounded the ’keeper and selflessly laid out the simplest of tap-ins for Brian McClair. The lopsided character of the 4–0 scoreline only hardened the growing conviction that the gap Manchester United had opened on their pursuers was turning into an unbridgeable chasm. Alex Ferguson, wearing a red wig, half-walking, half-dancing on the Wembley pitch, assuredly seemed to think as much at the final whistle.

  Whereas all the talk prior to the final had been of Ferguson’s team emulating legendary sides like Danny Blanchflower’s Spurs of 1961, the post-match coverage of the 113th FA Cup final focused on the contribution of one player rather than on the conquest of the Double. The Daily Mirrors headline said it all: ‘General De Goal’. Journalists swarmed around the first man ever to score two penalties in the grand Wembley showcase. Why had he decided to shoot twice to the left of Kharine? ‘Because he twice dived to his right,’ Éric said. ‘If he had twice dived to his left, I would have twice kicked to his right!’ Had he not felt nervous? ‘If you are nervous,’ came the reply, ‘you should stop playing football. This is the moment you prepare for all your life. There is the stadium, there are 80,000 people and the ball and the chance to win a Cup final. If that makes you nervous, you should change your occupation.’

  Mark Hughes was one of many voices joining in the chorus of praise. ‘He has really opened up everyone’s football awareness,’ the Welshman said. ‘We see Éric doing things, and we think, “I’ll try that.” We’re not as good at it as Éric, but he has freed us a little bit, and that’s why we now play with that little bit more flair’), but a few dissenting voices could also be heard. Simon Barnes, for example, wrote this cruel barb in The Times: ‘Éric Cantona is a man who seems to rise to the small occasion.’ Barnes, as he often does, had a point, which many others had made and would make again, though not always with the same flair for an epigram: Éric was a flat-track bully. Alluding to the League Cup final defeat by Aston Villa a few months previously, Barnes borrowed from Oscar Wilde to say: ‘To lose one Wembley final may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like a character defect; in particular a defect in the character of Éric Cantona.’

  Éric himself could not be held responsible for the adulation that was lavished on him. That he enjoyed it tremendously (and expected it, up to a point) cannot be doubted; the very extravagance of the compliments heaped upon his ‘genius’ helped him fend off a long-time companion of his – the demon of insecurity. But he could also be a sterner critic of himself than is commonly thought. ‘It’s too soon to call me a legend,’ he warned. ‘Before comparing me with George Best, Bobby Charlton or Denis Law, I prefer to be judged after two more years at Old Trafford.’ Never before had he suggested so clearly that his future was linked to the future of a particular club – and this at a time when a number of European giants were rumoured to covet him, Real Madrid and Internazionale among the most frequently mentioned suitors. In all likelihood, the Spaniards’ infatuation may have been nothing but a journalist’s fantasy, but Inter’s interest grew into something of an obsession for Massimo Moratti, whose father Angelo had turned the Milanese club into Europe’s most feared side in the mid-1960s, and who was desperate to recapture some of that faded glory. Time and again over the next three years, the young oil tycoon (who officially became the nerazzuri’s chairman in February 1995) would try and bring Cantona to Serie A. His courtship would not bear fruit, but, as we’ll see, it wouldn’t be for want of trying.

  Twenty-five thousand fans were waiting for the Double winners back in Manchester. Each of them had probably bought or been given a copy of ‘Come On You Reds’, the first single recorded by a club side42 to top the nation’s charts. Each of them knew Éric’s prodigious statistics for the season: 25 goals in 48 games. Here’s the detail: 3 goals scored with his left foot, 19 with his right, plus 3 headers; 21 from within the box, 4 from outside; plus 15 assists. Cantona himself, ten days away from his twenty-eighth birthday, was at the peak of his powers and relishing football as he never had before. Bernard Morlino heard him say on FA Cup final night: ‘If I hadn’t been a footballer, I would have had to be Jacques Mesrine or Albert Spaggiari to experience emotions as strong as these’ (a telling reference that warrants a longer digression for the benefit of English readers, which you will find at the end of this chapter).

  After taking part in Mark Hughes’s testimonial on May the 16th, the rebel went home to Boothstown, where he was finally reunited with Isabelle and their son in a modest semi-detached house worth less than £100,000, five doors away from the home of one of Ryan Giggs’ best friends. He still kept his room at the Novotel. ‘It’s boring to be in a big house,’ he said.

  When there are four of you, why would you buy a house with seven bedrooms? Why would I do that, if not to show people I am rich? I buy a house that I need, not to show people I am rich – they already know that. The man who buys the big house with all the bedrooms he doesn’t need shows he’s rich, but maybe he’s not rich inside. For me the atmosphere inside a house is very important: everywhere I have been with my family, it has been cosy. People who are successful want to show they are different, they live in the big house and try to live in another world. I want to live in the same world.

  Cantona’s rebellion stopped o
n the doormat. Come June, immediately after Éric had taken part in an inconsequential friendly tournament in Japan,43 Isabelle stopped teaching at Leeds University and the collection of cardboard boxes that had cluttered the family residence in Leeds was brought to the home Éric had occupied, alone, for several months already.

  Tony Smith, a Manchester United supporter and Boothstown resident, later said that ‘the whole village was buzzing with the news that he had come to live among “ordinary” people’, rather than hiding away in the exclusivity of the stockbroker belt. But it was not such a shock; he had lived modestly in Leeds, and had stayed in a Worsley motel before bringing his family across the Pennines. The locals quickly became accustomed to seeing Cantona driving through the neighbourhood. ‘I had the opportunity to speak to Éric Cantona outside my house during his most traumatic period,’ Smith recalled, referring to the aftermath of the Crystal Palace fracas,

  but on learning that I supported United he showed his usual friendliness. He was known among the supporters for understanding the importance of spending a few moments with them and, despite his superstar status, being the most approachable of all the players in the team. During his troubles, journalists camped outside his house seeking uncomplimentary stories, though I never heard a bad word spoken about him. Éric eventually left his rented house, and left us with some good memories. It isn’t often that Boothstown becomes home to one so famous, but Éric Cantona was more than a celebrity, he was a genuine folk hero.

  The names of Mesrine and Spaggiari carry a deep, sombre resonance for the French. Both were notorious gangsters of the 1970s, who became heroes in some sections of society for their daring assaults on symbols of the bourgeois establishment (France’s answer to the Kray twins, if you will, but with more panache and, in Mesrine’s case, far more violence). To them, or so they claimed, crime was also an act of rebellion, a moral and political statement which somehow drew the offender beyond the accepted boundaries of good and evil. Spaggiari had some justification to make such claims. He pulled off one of the most astonishing heists ever, the robbery of FF50m from the Société Générale in Nice in 1976, daubing the slogan sans armes, ni haine, ni violence’ (‘with no weapons, hatred or violence’) on a safe. Mesrine, who, in the best-selling autobiography he wrote in prison (L’Instinct de mort – ‘The Death Instinct’), boasted to have committed no less than thirty-nine murders, made for a more dubious modern-day Robin Hood. After an implausible escape from an interrogation chamber, Spaggiari spent the last twelve years of his life on the run before dying of throat cancer in Italy. Mesrine, a thug of considerable charm who, chomping a cigar, offered champagne to the police officer who caught him in his hideout, died in a hail of bullets in 1979, hand grenades and automatic weapons at his feet. It’s tempting to think that Cantona’s reference to these famous criminals was in keeping with the conventions of French society – I remember Spaggiari’s and Mesrine’s names being mentioned with some admiration around my family’s dinner table at the time of their exploits – but, beyond identifying himself with the adventurer-refusenik, it also revealed a political nihilism that has been a constant temptation for individualists in France for over a century.

  Éric’s politics cannot be defined in terms of a traditional left–right opposition. Spaggiari and Mesrine were military men who had been decorated for bravery in colonial conflicts, before drifting to the extremes of the political spectrum, the former to the right, the latter to the left. Both had strong connections with the Marseillais milieu and figures like the pimp, racketeer and drugs trafficker Gaëtan Zampa or the idealistic ‘lone wolf’ Charlie Bauer, for whom robbing at gunpoint and suffering solitary confinement were stages on the path to self-discovery; Zampa, a psychotic thug, Bauer a generous revolutionary at war with hypocrisy. What united Mesrine and Spaggiari – and must have seduced Cantona – was a refusal to recognize authority, any kind of authority. Éric never aligned himself with any party, but was quite happy to stand up and be counted when he was required (by friends or circumstances) to speak against politicians or ideas he felt aversion to. The ‘system’. Racism. Miscarriages of justice (he recently expressed support for a Corsican shepherd, Yvan Colonna, who had been convicted of the murder of a high-ranking civil servant, Claude Érignac). This is him talking live in front of French television cameras twelve years after his remark to Morlino: ‘Napoleon, celebrated when he re-established slavery . . . a giant who was small and who, today, has been replaced by a Le Pen wearing a mask: [Nicolas] Sarkozy.’ Reading through some passages of Mesrine’s memoirs, I came across this sentence: ‘If you live in the shadows, you’ll never get close to the sun,’ and thought: Éric could’ve said that. The boldness of the statement, all front and no hinterland, reminded me of many one-liners he had fed to interviewers ever since he emerged as a footballer of promise at Auxerre: theatricality posturing for truth, still divulging a sense of hope and a need to be seen as a révolté, a word for which I can find no equivalent in English. A ‘rebel’, maybe, but whose rebellion stems from an innate thirst for justice, and who knows it cannot be quenched. Cantona’s politics cannot be translated either; it might be because they don’t necessarily make sense.

  15

  Cantona imperator.

  THE ROAD TO

  SELHURST PARK: JUNE 1994

  TO JANUARY 1995

  ‘There’s a fine line between freedom and chaos. To some extent I espouse the idea of anarchy. What I am really after is an anarchy of thought, a liberation of the mind from all convention.’

  Cantona’s role in the 1994 World Cup was restricted to that of a pundit for French television. He sat next to his friend Didier Roustan, a charcoal-eyed, dark-haired presenter whose ‘hip’ delivery betrayed as great a desire to promote himself as to introduce a new style of sporting commentary. I remember Roustan asking Éric shortly before the the start of the final between Brazil and Italy: ‘What’s this game? A rock’n’roll final?’ Cantona, sporting superb shades, his skin tanned by the American sun, paused for what seemed an eternity, before replying, as if explaining the facts of life to a child: ‘A football final,’ to the delight of many, myself included.

  Éric made a fine pundit, clear and forthright in his analysis of pivotal passages of play, rightly determined not to fake enthusiasm for what was mostly a disappointing tournament. The competition didn’t pass without incident for him. According to The Times, Cantona was ‘arrested’ by security guards after a scuffle with an official who had questioned the validity of his accreditation and refused him entrance to the stadium where Brazil and Sweden – one of France’s opponents in the qualifiers – were to play their semi-final. As no charges were brought, it can be assumed that it was nothing more than one of those irritating encounters with a jobsworth which are all too familiar to travelling reporters.

  Of far greater importance to Éric was the fatal shooting of Colombian defender Andrés Escobar, who had scored an own goal in a group game against the USA on 22 June, and was murdered outside a bar in Medellin ten days later, apparently on the orders of a gambling syndicate. The assassin, a bodyguard named Humberto Muñoz Castro, pumped twelve bullets into the body of ‘the gentleman of football’, as he was known in his native country, allegedly shouting ‘Gooooooooooooooal!’ when he fled from the scene. For Cantona, this, and nothing else, certainly not the victory of a functional Seleçao, was what this World Cup should be remembered for. He often mentioned this tragedy to his wife Isabelle and to his closest friends. Was that all there was to football? Violence?

  But violence was to be the leitmotiv of Éric’s and Manchester United’s season, long before 25 January, when he jumped feet first over the advertising boards at Crystal Palace; so much so that it is tempting to see the months that passed until then as a slow build-up to an unavoidable explosion. Many United fans have told me that their 1994–95 side was perhaps the strongest their club had assembled since the heyday of Law, Best and Charlton. It was certainly the most ill-disciplined. Looking back, it i
s hard not to suggest that they literally ‘ran riot’ until the consequences of their constant infringement of the rules endangered the very aim of their manager’s project.

  Éric set the tone with a three-game ban after elbowing an opponent in the last but one of a string of five pre-season friendlies, on 6 August. He had already been shown a yellow card in the same match (against Rangers) for turning his back on referee Andrew Waddell, when the official had intended to issue him with a final warning after a shocking lunge on Stephen Pressley, which thankfully missed its target. His ban wouldn’t come into effect until after the Charity Shield, in which he scored a penalty: a routine 2–0 victory over Blackburn which proved nothing except that United were so far ahead of their domestic rivals that they could stroll to a win against one of their supposedly strongest challengers. After which an Éric-less United negotiated their first three Premiership games with a mixture of confidence, slickness and luck: seven points out of nine was a more than decent return, but as Kevin McCarra put it, ‘Cantona may be a work of art, but he is of no use to his manager as a still life.’

  Éric then left England again, this time to join the French national team, which he captained to a 2–2 draw against the Czech Republic on 17 August, a game that had looked all but lost until the introduction on the hour of the young Bordeaux playmaker Zinédine Zidane, making his debut, who scored twice in the last five minutes. This was to be one of only two games that the two most iconic French players of their era would play together, the other being a goalless draw against Slovakia on 7 September, when ‘Zizou’ once more came off the bench. Aimé Jacquet already felt that fielding both registas in the same line-up would unbalance his team; for the time being, Cantona held the better hand, as he would until he surrendered it through an act of folly, and refused to be dealt a new one in January 1996, as we’ll see.