Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Leading these songs – eight of them – is a man whose name is familiar to anyone associated with the club, its unofficial bard: Pete Boyle, keeper of the flame, poet after his own fashion, conductor of the Éric-worshipping choir. As long as Pete is around, no one will be allowed to forget that Cantona truly was the greatest Red Devil ever. I knew of him through a mutual friend, designer Jim Phelan, himself a Mancunian, who released a small number of records related to Manchester United on his Exotica label in the 1990s. Together with my musical mentor Mike Alway, he also played a prominent role in the conception of the Bend It! Series, which attempted a playful reconciliation of popular music and football long before it became fashionable to write dissertations about ‘terrace culture’. (I had a part in these too, in one instance contributing one of my very worst songs to a homage to Éric Cantona which only completists would find worth tracking down.) Pete’s own efforts – with a vocal ensemble called ‘The K Stand’ – didn’t strive for subtlety. He assembled a squad of drinking, chanting companions, and bellowed Old Trafford classics such as ‘Éric the King’ and ‘The Twelve Days of Cantona’ (lyrics: Pete Boyle) into a microphone. The result was rousing, chaotic or frightening, depending on which end of the supporting spectrum you found yourself.

  I didn’t feel completely at ease when Pete and I finally met in a Manchester pub. His friends were not the sort of people I normally associated with in London wine bars. Our phone conversations and emails had been businesslike in tone, and I’d certainly made no mention in them that my own club allegiance was not to United, but to the ‘Southern ponces’ of Arsenal. I thought I knew his face, as he’d made an appearance in one of the videos United sold by the hundreds of thousands to Cantona’s fans. The man I bought a non-alcoholic round for (his mates favoured lager) had changed a great deal from the rather podgy character I’d seen in this film. He was much thinner, almost gaunt, and very, very intense. Soon, however, the awkwardness gave way to the camaraderie that football supporters share to a far greater degree than they’re given credit for in England. Pete recounted his tales, which, fine story-teller that he is, needed no embellishment.

  This was the man who’d schlepped down to Croydon in a van, and slept in it on a car park, to make sure he’d be given the very first admission ticket to Éric’s appeal trial in the spring of 1995 (it is still in his possession). When Éric’s sentence was commuted from a jail term to 120 hours of community service, it was he who ran out of the courthouse to exclaim: ‘The King is free!’ He it was again who had organized the first demonstration of support for his hero outside Old Trafford once the verdict had been announced, and had been chased away by mounted police. I saw a film of it, shot by an amateur video cameraman. There were just half a dozen supporters who chanted their slogans outside the ground. Talking to one of them was like being introduced to the very core of the Cantona cult, to the most exclusive lodge of that Temple. Well over ten years after Cantona’s retirement, every weekend, Pete stood on a table in a United pub and led the beer guzzlers into another lung-bursting rendition of ‘Éric the King’ (‘a song we used to sing for Denis Law, and which the crowd picked up on when we played in Budapest’ – that would be on 15 September 1993, then).

  For some, Pete might seem something of an oddball, an eccentric; but his life has a purpose: Manchester United and, more precisely, Éric Cantona, subjects he talks about with unaffected eloquence. And when he did, our table listened respectfully. This guy knew his stuff. He’d been in the same Budapest hotel as the team when they played Honved in the European Cup. He’d shot pool with Éric and Claude Boli (‘in February 1994’) in a Castle-field pub called the Peveril of the Peak, which most footballers would make considerable efforts to avoid. He’d then shared a drink with the two of them in Boli’s home, ‘just behind the Kippax’. Alex Ferguson mentioned his name in interviews.

  Pete’s fervour brought into sharp relief a shortcoming which is to be found in every single football biography I have come across. It is that fans have no place in them.

  Players’ lives and careers are told as if they were acted out in an empty theatre. How absurd! An Éric Cantona can only exist when one of his touches of genius is cheered by a roar, or when jeers greet a mistimed pass or a clumsy foul. Pete Boyle haunts Éric Cantona as much as Éric Cantona haunts Pete Boyle. It is true that Éric literally crossed the divide as no other footballer had done before him when he jumped over an advertising board to assault a Crystal Palace fan. Strikingly enough, it is that blurring of the distinction between actor and spectator which was picked on by many of his harshest critics to underline the ‘unforgivable’ nature of his act.

  Why then are supporters erased from the game they own?

  It makes no more sense than historians (I’m thinking of another Éric, Éric Hobsbawm) who tell the story of the twentieth century without once mentioning the only socio-cultural activity which linked – physically, emotionally and (arguably) spiritually – billions of human beings who passed through this epoch: football. These are the same academics who’ll tear each other apart over the interpretation of some obscure data of wheat production, or will devote chapter after chapter to Socialist Realism without once wondering what could be the significance, in a totalitarian regime, of supporting Dynamo Kyiv rather than Spartak Moscow, or CSKA rather than Spartak. I’ll take but one example to illustrate the foolishness, if not the folly, of deleting football from history. How can we hope to comprehend fully the 1956 Budapest Uprising if we fail to keep in mind that Puskas’ team had been Olympic champions in 1952, the first team to beat England at Wembley, and were robbed of victory in the 1954 World Cup by – it has been alleged – doped-up West Germans? The pride ordinary Hungarians felt at seeing their nation beating the world’s best fed their belief that an escape from the Soviet sphere of influence was possible. Their team played brave, imaginative – dare I say revolutionary – football. It fed a nation’s refusal of the grim order that had been imposed on them. For Marxist and post-structuralist historians, this other ‘opium of the people’, football, belongs to the realm of ‘superstructure’, an expression of economically driven social changes, and can, therefore, be pushed aside to the touchline while the real game unfolds. This is a belittlement of football’s power, a negation of its universality and its centrality to human life. Hobsbawm himself has said: ‘The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.’ That ‘seems’, of course, gives his own game away.

  But football writers are just as short-sighted when we espouse the profound-sounding, but ultimately silly pronouncement of French aspiring professional footballer turned philosopher Jacques Derrida: ‘Beyond the touchline is nothing.’ Compare with Jock Stein’s ‘Football is nothing without fans’. Derrida’s and Stein’s ‘nothing’ aren’t the same, of course. Derrida points to the absolute nothingness that lies (or doesn’t, if you wish to take this epigram seriously) beyond the pitch on which the laws of football determine human action. I play, therefore I am. By contrast, the manager’s ‘nothing’ is an assertion of the game’s essential materiality – football is primarily experienced by the senses, and a perfect strike at goal only acquires its full beauty (and signification) when it is met by the clamour of the crowd.

  Some players – Nicolas Anelka is one – have confessed that, should they be given the choice, they wouldn’t mind taking part in matches played in front of empty stands. Arsène Wenger once told me that the fervour of English fans ‘added to’ his joy of managing Arsenal. His choice of words had struck me. It was clear that what mattered most to him was the enactment of the principles he’d instilled on the training ground, which led to the full expression of collective as well as individual talent within parameters he’d defined himself. Stein shared this desire, no doubt. But, to him, ‘collective’ also meant ‘communal’. Éric Cantona was a Steinian. This is how he described his first goal for Leeds United: ‘At the exact moment when the ball entered the net, the thousands of supporters who wer
e behind the goal seemed to dive towards the pitch.’ Only in England, he said, could such ‘ecstasy’ be found. Only in England could he communicate (the religious connotations of that word should not be taken as a mere linguistic coincidence) with a mass of strangers whose passion he shared. Some will point time and again to the honours he failed to win on the international stage and argue that their absence invalidates his claim to greatness. They are misguided. Stanley Matthews won just the one FA Cup medal. George Best never played in the World Cup or the European Championships. Yachine had a poor tournament in 1966. Yet all three were undoubted ‘greats’, and not just because of their unique gifts. They were able to establish an emotional link with the fans that more decorated players found elusive or even saw as a distraction. Go to Old Trafford, and ask anyone: who of David Beckham (ten years at the club, European champion in 1999, six times a Premier League winner) and Éric Cantona (who spent less than half as long in Manchester, and consistently underperformed in Europe) they consider to be a ‘great’ or a ‘legend’ of United? Éric, of course. The fans know a ‘great’ when they see one – they should know: without them, greatness is unattainable. Beyond the touchline is everything.

  16

  About to face the FA’s disciplinary committee.

  SELHURST PARK

  Sports photographers didn’t travel light in 1995. Before digital technology and the internet, they relied on cumbersome mobile equipment, which could only be brought to the stadium in a customized van. Steve Lindsell had arrived at Selhurst Park in one of those, expecting this Premier League evening to pan out as other such evenings normally did, arriving early at the ground, putting on the customary bib, setting his cameras in position, snapping, retiring to the lab, sending his photographs on the wire, going home. But on that night of 25 January, at precisely 9 p.m., his routine was shaken by one of the most extraordinary scenes ever witnessed in an English sporting arena: the infamous ‘kung-fu kick’ (ossoto-gari or mashawa-gari? The question still divides Cantona fanatics on internet forums) which ensured Cantona’s place in the pantheon of footballing villains. The next day, every newspaper in the country featured the same picture on their front page in their first edition. Lindsell, who took it, had no idea that it would become such a powerful emblem – maybe the emblem – of Cantona’s troubled career.

  It had been a fairly uneventful game up to that point. Palace had set out to disturb United’s usual rhythm, and largely succeeded. Defender Richard Shaw (who was voted Palace’s ‘player of the year’ at the end of the season) had been given the task of shadowing Cantona, and was acquitting himself well, much to Éric’s annoyance, as the game’s referee, Alan Wilkie, seemed to turn a blind eye to the crafty knocks Shaw was landing on his shins on and off the ball. ‘No yellow cards, then?’ he enquired of the official as they walked back to the dressing-room at half-time. In the tunnel, just as the game was about to restart, Wilkie was asked the question again by a seemingly calm Cantona, and then, in typically more robust language, by an irate Alex Ferguson: ‘Why don’t you do your fucking job?’ The referee ignored them. In the 61st minute of the game, Shaw took advantage of Wilkie turning his back to kick Éric again. The foul had gone unnoticed by the official, but Cantona’s retaliation – a kick of his own – hadn’t escaped his assistant Eddie Walsh’s attention. Another red card was the unavoidable consequence of his flash of temper, of which there had been so many already in the previous months: it was the fifth time Éric had been dismissed in his three years in England, an astonishingly high figure for an attacking player, especially if one bears in mind that none of these dismissals occurred while he played for Leeds United, and that he also collected sixteen cautions during the same period.

  The long walk back to the dressing-room was a familiar one to him. He hardly remonstrated. He walked away, turned round after a few steps, looked Wilkie straight in the eye and pulled his collar down, the surest means to indicate he knew his game was over, and that he did not question the validity of the decision. Lindsell trained his camera on the player, who was departing from the pitch at an even pace, and was now going past the dugout where Alex Ferguson stood, looking the other way.

  ‘I was positioned on the opposite side of the ground,’ Lindsell told me, ‘just following Cantona after his dismissal. Then, all of a sudden, he jumped over the fence and kicked that guy! I snapped, and snapped again. I thought I had a good picture, but couldn’t imagine the impact it would have. I went to my van outside Selhurst Park, printed the roll, which must have taken me 15 to 20 minutes, then sent the pictures. The first paper to receive them was the Daily Mirror. But it was only the day afterwards that all hell broke loose.’

  Images of the incident itself have been played and replayed so often that it seems almost pointless to describe it again in detail. A snarling young man rushed down eleven rows of the stand to shout abuse at Cantona. He later, and quite ludicrously, claimed (in the Sun, who paid him for his account of the confrontation) to have said something along the lines of: ‘Off you go, Cantona – it’s an early bath for you!’ According to the numerous eyewitnesses who enjoyed tabloid fame after the explosion, the words that came out of his distorted face were closer to: Tuck off, you motherfucking French bastard!’ according to Luke Beckley, who was eight at the time.

  With his cropped hair, pasty skin and tight-fitting black jacket, Matthew Simmons could have come straight from central casting, the archetypal white thug. But Cantona’s victim was no actor. The Mirror soon revealed that ‘Simmons, twenty, of Kynaston Avenue, Thornton Heath, South London, has a conviction for assault with intent to rob. In 1992, he’d been fined £100 and placed on two years’ probation after striking a petrol station cashier.’ The cashier in question was a young Sri Lankan who had escaped serious head injuries when the three-foot spanner wielded by Simmons slipped and struck him on the shoulder instead. Quite amusingly, his aggressor was also a qualified referee and, less amusingly, a BNP and National Front sympathizer. Éric had at least been lucky enough to pick on someone who could expect little sympathy from public opinion, or the courts.

  ‘Always be the first to hit! It’ll surprise the other,’ Albert Cantona had instructed his son. At Auxerre Éric had put this teaching into practice when confronted by a whole team intent on making him pay for an assault on one of their players. He had done the same thing at Martigues when provoked by a foul-mouthed section of the crowd, and Michel Der Zakarian had learnt to his cost that Cantona could do it on the pitch too.

  But Selhurst Park was different. From the initial foul to the moment when, escorted by Peter Schmeichel, a terrified Crystal Palace steward named Jim Page, and United’s kitman Norman Davies,44 Cantona finally entered the tunnel, 88 seconds had elapsed, seconds that felt like an eternity. Cantona had had time to compose himself. He looked as inscrutable as ever as he left the field of play, his chest puffed up, his head held high, apparently deaf to the taunts of the crowd. Why he suddenly lunged over the advertising boards he has never been able to explain. In 2004, in one of the best interviews he has ever given to the British press, he told Darren Tullett of the Observer how, if there hadn’t been a barrier, he would have just ‘steamed in with [his] fists’. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘you meet thousands of people like him. And how things turn out can hinge on the precise moment you run into them. If I’d met that guy on another day, things may have happened very differently even if he had said exactly the same things. Life is weird like that. You’re on a tightrope every day.’ Éric then unconvincingly attempted to justify himself, with the words of a unrepentant egotist. ‘The most important thing to me is that I was who I was. I was myself. Even if you understood why you did something, it doesn’t mean you won’t go and do the same thing tomorrow. The best thing you can do is to take a step back and laugh at yourself. A bit of self-derision.’

  Cantona took a while to see things in that light-hearted way. According to Page and Davies, he was ‘bloody angry’. So much so that the latter had to position himself at
the door of the dressing-room to avoid another, even more dramatic fracas. ‘He was furious. He wanted to go out again . . . I locked the door and told him: “If you want to go back on the pitch, you’ll have to go over my body, and break the door down.”’ Once Cantona had recovered some of his composure, Davies brewed some tea for him. The English panacea worked on this occasion. Cantona sipped his cup and headed for the showers without another word being exchanged between the two men. By the time the game had ended in a 1–1 draw, according to Ryan Giggs’s recollection, ‘Éric wasn’t agitated’, either in the dressing-room or on the plane that took the team back to Manchester late that night. ‘Nothing was said because none of us, the gaffer included, realized the seriousness of what had gone on. Word hadn’t got through, and Éric was giving nothing away.’

  As he confided to Erik Bielderman many years later, Alex Ferguson failed to realize the ‘seriousness’ of the situation because he had no clear idea of what had happened after the actual sending-off. ‘I wasn’t looking at him when he left the pitch. I was focusing on how to reorganize the team tactically, ten versus eleven. I was told [what happened] and, once back at home, my son Jason asked me: “Do you want to see the pictures? I’ve recorded the game.” I refused and went to bed. Sleep wouldn’t come. I got up around 3–4 in the morning, and I saw. The shock was huge . . .’