Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Doubts would linger for months to come. One close confidant of Cantona’s told me that the player had indeed been ‘that close’ to moving to Italy at the time. The urge to leave England and the lure of phenomenal wages were not the only factors preying on Éric’s mind. He felt that Manchester United should have made far more effort to bring in the top-class players required to achieve the club’s oft-stated ambition to rejoin Europe’s footballing elite. The names of Gabriel Batistuta, Marcelo Salas and even Zinédine Zidane had been mentioned. None of them came to Old Trafford, of course, and a number of Cantona’s friends believed they had been bandied only to pacify the one genuine star the club possessed: Éric himself. In an interview Marc Beaugé and I conducted in March 2009, Alex Ferguson admitted that – with the benefit of hindsight – he regretted not having been more forceful in his efforts to strengthen his squad at that time. And when I asked him if he thought it could have been a factor in Éric’s decision to call it quits a year hence, his answer was a plain ‘yes’. Cantona wished to prove himself on the European stage, which he wasn’t sure that United could help him do any more. Looking back, however, had he not been in a similar situation when he had found himself frozen out of the Marseille team four years previously? He could have chosen to walk out, but bided his time. Leaving would have been quitting, admitting defeat. He would not give his enemies the satisfaction of knowing that they had succeeded in hounding him out of England after they had made it impossible for him to live and play in France. And the children of Manchester played their part too.

  The first of Éric’s 120 hours of community service was spent signing autographs at The Cliff, surrounded by the now familiar gaggle of cameramen, security personnel and hardcore fans, who were augmented that day – 18 April – by Liz Calderbank, a supervisor of the Manchester Probation Service, whose presence was the only reminder that Cantona was expiating a crime. It was he who had suggested that his time would be best employed coaching children from the Manchester area, and this he did over a period of three months, to the delight of some 700 boys and girls, the first of whom were a dozen players from Ellsmere Park Junior FC, aged 9–12. That club had no strip and no pitch to train and play on; in fact, it had barely come into existence, having been involved in a mere three games before Cantona took them under his wing for a two-hour session.

  Few of the boys had managed to get a minute’s sleep the night before and couldn’t contain their excitement when the moment finally came to meet their idol in the club’s gymnasium. Paul Thompson, aged twelve, enthused: ‘We just ran up to him cheering. He was totally brilliant. I thought he would be a bit harsh, but he was great. I talked to him in French, and he told me not to get rough because I would be sent off.’ Journalists then moved on to Aiden Sharp, 11, and wrote in their notebooks: ‘He worked really hard and made us work the whole time. Éric was a very nice man, very patient and gentle. I’ve learnt tons from him today.’ The Times had sent Rob Hughes to Salford, who heard another of the beaming children tell him: ‘He were [sic] terrific, showed me I could score. He told me to concentrate on one corner of the net, to aim for that, and now I score every time.’

  Éric adored children, in whom he saw a reflection of his former and truer self, before he had been emotionally maimed by the corrupting power of professional football. He had said so himself on many occasions – he couldn’t be granted the privilege of being a child again, but playing brought him as close as could be to this unattainable aim. There, at The Cliff, the uncontrollable pupil, Guy Roux’s ‘caractériel’, turned into a patient guide for starstruck youngsters who could barely speak through the tears when the time came to leave their ‘King’ for good. ‘It was the best day of my life,’ one of them said, shaking with a mixture of grief and elation, wishing that tomorrow, and the day after that, and every other day, he could jump from his team’s minibus to meet his hero, distraught by the realization that this would never happen again. The haunting image of that boy’s face has never left me, and I don’t think it has left Cantona’s mind either. He truly loved every single one of these kids, and wasn’t playing to the audience when he said, later in the year: ‘It wasn’t a punishment. It was like a gift,’ adding after a half-thoughtful, half-mischievous pause a ‘thank you’ that, I believe, was partly but not entirely ironic, as it was certainly meant for the children he spent the end of the spring with as much as for the court that had ‘punished’ him. To one of them, ten-year-old Michael Sargent, he had confided that he ‘would really like to stay [at United]’. He owed them a debt, one that was light to carry, and that he was happy to honour. These children had ‘helped [him] a lot’, he said. Judging by the transformation of his character over the coming year, they clearly had. He had told a boy called Simon Croft: ‘If you’re going to get a yellow card, walk away and don’t argue with the referee,’ words that others like Célestin Oliver and Sébastien Mercier had drummed into him when he was a minot himself. At long last, he was about to take on board the advice he had been given, and I’m not so sure it would have been the case if he hadn’t had to pass it on to others.

  Éric wouldn’t return to competitive football until 30 September 1995 at the earliest. Ahead of him lay five months of inactivity, boredom, rumours, and the odd trumpet lesson with John MacMurray, the Canadian principal of the Hallé Orchestra. He found he had limited gifts for this instrument, and soon moved on. Support came from unlikely sources, like the bass player of The Stranglers, his compatriot Jean-Jacques Burnel, who toyed with the idea of including a tribute to Éric in the band’s forthcoming twentieth anniversary tour. ‘[Cantona] has done more for Anglo-French relations than anyone since Brigitte Bardot,’ the punk musician said. ‘You English should be grateful for him.’ It’s true that Burnel had his own reasons for empathizing with Cantona: he had once attacked a spectator at a Stranglers gig: ‘He insulted my mother, so I put down my guitar, leapt off the stage and landed him in hospital.’ Incidentally, Burnel taught karate when he wasn’t playing with The Stranglers. Meanwhile, in France, the editor of Paris-Match magazine, Patrick Mahé, was putting the finishing touches to his book Cantona au Bûcher (‘Cantona at the Stake’), oddly described in its blurb as ‘an impassioned plea for the celebrated footballer against the anti-French hysteria of the Anglo-Londoners’. Make of that what you will.

  As for football, by the end of April, a verbal agreement had been reached to extend Éric’s contract at Old Trafford – or so it seemed, as his agent Jean-Jacques Amorfini was still waiting for a written proposal. Éric, whose present deal was due to expire a year hence, would commit himself to Manchester United until the end of the 1997–98 season. Despite Amorfini’s warning that things ‘could take longer’, the papers which had predicted Cantona’s exit swiftly announced that a resolution could be achieved ‘within a few days’, and they were right. Éric put his signature to a new, improved three-year agreement (which would bring him £750,000 a year, and not £1m, as most contemporary sources had it) on the very day English football’s only other true foreign star of the time, Jürgen Klinsmann, headed back to his native Germany: 27 April. It was Éric’s first appearance in front of the media since his ‘sardines’ quip. He looked heavier, which wasn’t much of a surprise, as his weight tended to fluctuate wildly when he wasn’t playing regularly. There was even the hint of a double chin on the face that emerged from a candy-striped pink jacket Jeeves would have instantly removed from Bertie Wooster’s wardrobe. ‘I can forget everything,’ he told the press, ‘and we can win everything. We are bigger than the people who have sometimes been so hard and so wrong’ – among whom he obviously didn’t include himself.

  The news was greeted with relish by those who had stood by him back in January, the former Manchester United midfielder Pat Crerand among them. ‘I’m delighted that Éric has the courage to turn around and show two fingers to a lot of people in England,’ he said. ‘So many clowns have jumped on the bandwagon.’ Brendon Batson, speaking on behalf of the Professional Footballers’ Assoc
iation, who had voted Cantona their player of the year in 1994, gushed: ‘we didn’t want to lose a talent like Éric’s. Now we just hope that when he does reappear on a football pitch that he receives a decent reception.’ Many shared his apprehension, like the fan who called a local radio station to say he wondered whether ‘he [Cantona] could cope with what he’s going to get next season’.

  But while others celebrated, and fretted, Éric slipped away to France. He had more urgent matters to attend to. Isabelle gave birth to their second child, Joséphine – named after Cantona’s beloved grandfather Joseph, who had died in 1991 – on 7 July. Then, one week later, the new father had another birth to attend – his own, in the guise of a theatrical character. He drove to the Avignon festival to attend the premiere of Ode à Canto, a play written and directed by the alarmingly prolific Gérard Gelas, which claimed to be based on Antonin Artaud’s Trip to the Land of the Tarahumaras. ‘Play’ might be the wrong word, as it was little more than a comic dialogue between a regal Cantona – the actor Damien Rémy, clad in the red of Manchester United, collar up, of course – and an aspiring footballer called Lorenzo. Éric took his seat among the few hundred spectators of the Théâtre du Chêne noir, where Gelas had been based since 1967. French television cameras were there too, all of them trained on the footballer’s face in the small crowd. Thankfully, the King was amused. ‘I felt close to the main character, all through the play,’ he said. ‘That shows how an actor can do anything. We’re just footballers, and I don’t know if we can do anything but play football. It’s a good thing that the main character says things I might not have said myself, but which I could have said, yes.’ Cantona was referring – obliquely – to the political subtext of the farce, in which unsubtle references were made to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, renamed ‘Affront National’ by Gelas. I must say that my blood froze when I watched a video recording of Ode à Canto. The odd declamatory tone and self-conscious poetry of the lines reminded me of an amateur staging of one of Dario Fo’s anarchic plays I had once attended in the Auvergne, a ghastly memory that will never leave me. But I could understand how Cantona was taken with passages such as ‘. . . Marseilles, bitten by the wind of corsairs, children of Greek sailors, Italian stonemasons, Armenians, Algerians or Africans . . . Marseilles, which affords herself the luxury of being an island in the midst of a continent . . .’ If every man’s an island, that one suited him, the son of Les Caillols, born and raised on a rocky spur, sharp and unyielding as stone itself. A Marseillais, always.

  The hero of Gelas’ imagination left the Provençal sun soon after his consecration on the stage. Ode à Canto would be one of the playwright’s most resounding successes; his troupe toured with the play for three years at home and abroad, carried by the notoriety of its subject. Cantona himself travelled back to Manchester, where Alex Ferguson had organized a pre-season friendly between his team and Rochdale. Unaware that he might be breaking the terms of his ban by taking part in this match played behind closed doors at The Cliff, Éric found himself in the eye of yet another storm. On 30 July, five days after the game had taken place, FA spokesman Mike Parry read the following statement to the usual shoal of ‘sardines’: ‘We became aware of the fact that Éric Cantona had played through newspaper reports and have written to Manchester United asking for their observations, and to ask them under what sort of conditions the match was played. The ban imposed on Cantona said that he should be suspended from all football activities until the beginning of October, so we assume Manchester United have a plausible explanation. We’d just like to know what it is – to clear the matter up.’

  The price tag – £7.5m, second only to Alan Shearer’s, and £3m more than Newcastle recruit David Ginola’s – that The Times’s new ‘interactive team football’ game had put on Cantona suddenly looked far less attractive, even if the affair didn’t make much noise at first. The sporting public was looking elsewhere. Linford Christie had failed at the World Athletics Championships, and Jonathan Edwards was about to produce a staggering triple jump of 18.29m to win the gold in Gothenburg, setting two world records in the process. England’s cricket team had woken up at last against the West Indies. Manchester United fans were getting used (with a great deal of difficulty) to the idea of living without Paul Ince and Mark Hughes, who had been sold to Inter and Chelsea respectively, while Andreï Kanchelskis was – rightly – said to be on his way to Everton. They didn’t know that a furious Cantona had headed straight back to France when he had heard that the FA was considering bringing another charge against him.

  They wouldn’t have to wait for long. Jean-Jacques Bertrand delivered Éric’s ultimatum in Paris, on 7 August. ‘Éric Cantona will not return to England unless the FA goes back on its decision, which forbids him from taking part in training games behind closed doors for his club,’ he said. The authorities were given a strict deadline: ‘Friday the 11th of August, 1995, at midnight.’ The ploy worked. The FA, who had faced almost unanimous criticism in the media for their rigid stance, crawled back under a rock: ‘[We] received a response from Manchester United in regard to our inquiry about Éric Cantona. We are entirely satisfied with their explanation and we have conveyed that to the club’. But the camel’s back appeared to have been broken for good before Éric’s persecutors had beaten a sheepish retreat.

  Cantona had faxed a transfer request to his club, as was acknowledged by United’s press officer Ken Ramsden. ‘[Éric] was very upset at the recent inquiry by the FA concerning his involvement in the training session of 25 July,’ he said. ‘He told Martin Edwards that he felt he had little future in the English game and that his career would be best served by a move abroad,’ which everyone guessed meant Inter Milan in Italy. However, ‘The board has considered the request very carefully but is not prepared to agree to it, believing that it is in the best interests of both the club and player that he remains with them.’ Alex Ferguson’s task was to convince Cantona that his ‘best interests’ would indeed be protected if he chose not to carry on his threat of leaving. In public, he just expressed the hope that ‘things [would] settle down over the next few days’. Away from the cameras, while still trying to bring the protracted transfer of Andreï Kanchelskis to Everton to a satisfactory conclusion (it had now been referred to the Premier League), Ferguson embarked on a quite extraordinary rescue mission to Paris. Perhaps he felt a degree of responsibility in the affair, even though he had genuinely believed that the confidential friendlies he had scheduled against teams such as Oldham, Bury, Rochdale and apparently a few others as well, did not fall within the scope of ‘organized matches’ which Cantona was not permitted to play in. All he had wanted to do was to involve Éric in the day-to-day life of his team, keep him fit, and sate his hunger for the ball. It hadn’t helped that United had flown out to Malaysia for one of their money-spinning summer tours almost immediately after the friendly which was at the heart of the dispute: Éric had literally been left behind.

  As soon as he had been informed that Cantona was packing his bags, Ferguson had driven to Worsley, where he had found a distinctly unresponsive Frenchman who had chosen to rely on room service to avoid mingling with the seagulls waiting for him in the restaurant. Ferguson could and did empathize with the plight of his player, to the point that, had it not been for a late-night conversation with his wife on his return, he might well have concluded that losing Cantona was unavoidable. But Cathy Ferguson felt that her husband shouldn’t yield so easily, and slowly brought him round to share her point of view. The next morning, Ferguson, who had barely slept, informed Bertrand that he wished to speak to Éric, who had now left for France, and that he was willing to head for the airport straight away. Cantona’s adviser agreed to a meeting, which would take place on 9 August, the day after the manager was due to attend a book launch in London. Wine tends to flow freely on such occasions, and that night was no exception. A relaxed Ferguson made some unguarded remarks to his dinner companions, a number of whom were journalists who immediately info
rmed their news desks that they had better dispatch their special forces to Heathrow and Roissy. How could Ferguson beat his pursuers?

  The phone rang in the room he’d booked at the George V hotel. It was Jean-Jacques Amorfini, one of Cantona’s closest confidants as well as the vice-chairman of the French PFA. He would come and collect Ferguson in the evening. All he would have to do would be to follow the porter when he turned up at his door, which he did shortly before 7.30 p.m. as arranged. The two men made their way through a maze of corridors, through the kitchen, down to a side exit where Amorfini was waiting, holding two motorcycle helmets. Ferguson donned his, and sat on the pillion of a Harley-Davidson. The bike roared and quickly slipped out of sight in the Parisian streets. Its destination was a quiet, almost deserted restaurant – its owner had taken the precaution to place a ‘fermé’ sign on the door. Éric was there, as were Jean-Jacques Bertrand and a secretary.